SEO Zoo

What works for Google Adsense?

2007-08-26T21:44:00.005+08:00

Here are three tips on how to make your cash register ring with your Google Adsense:

Maintain a Google Sitemap for your site and keep them up to date.
Place a bookmark(s) for people to come back. Use only the social bookmarks that can really drive traffic. I recommend Technorati, DIGG, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.
Make contents that people really want to see. If you find a good article to put in your website, don't copy it but do an article rewrite. If you have ways of doing things better than the usual, make an article about it.

Keep on doing these things at all times. Put in two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. That makes it 10 to 12 hours each weekend. After constantly doing this, you can really see an improvement with your Google Adsense account!

Also, you can diversify... Make many sites with good quality and has useful information that serve a real purpose and fulfill a need on the web.

Diversity is the key. Don't worry if your site would loose rank. Instead, work on it and figure it out! If you're not diversified, prepare yourself for the sleepless nights ahead... and lots of them if you do this for a living.

But don't just diversify with new sites, go for new topics too! Innovate things! And you can make a big difference. Good luck! :)

New Linking Strategy of 2007

2007-08-26T21:44:00.003+08:00

Focus on Direct Traffic from Referrals
If you get a link, want and expect traffic.
Make sure the link is located above the fold and in a very good location on the page.
Focus on Indirect Traffic from increased position in the SERPs (because of high rankings in search engines)
Make sure you have already gone and tested which keyword phrases which converts best on your site. It will force you to use that anchor text in a great linking campaign and great ranking, great traffic, and great results in terms of sales.
Let go of old, outdated methods.
The old reciprocal linking methodology will not work today. Make sure that you only exchange links with relevant sites.

Why is Linking Important?
In order to gain Link Popularity and Link Reputation!

Which is which? Text links and Image links?
In terms of link popularity and link reputation, the image links do little for you. What would boost you is the text within a link called anchor text.

It's not going after the biggest and best keyword phrase.
It is after the best keyword phrase for your site.

Keep in mind that the Google PageRank is an info 3-5 months delayed. This is to protect their algorithms from competitors, and from black hat and spammers to manipulate their process.

If you really want to check your actual links/backlinks, use Yahoo Site Explore as the measuring stick on how you get links, instead look at the total value what the site can bring. Google does not count the full amount of links but they show links that they don't actually count. You will not know which links are counted or not.

Tips in Advertising on Craigslist

2007-08-26T21:44:00.001+08:00

Define Craigslist

It is a centralized network of online urban communities, featuring free classified advertisements (with jobs, internships, housing, personals, for sale/barter/wanted, services, community, gigs and resumes categories) and forums sorted by various topics.

With over 10 million new classified ads each month, Craigslist is the leading classifieds service in any medium.

The classified advertisements in Craigslist range from traditional buy/sell ads and community announcements, to personal ads and even "erotic services".

It is found at the top 50 sites in Alexa Traffic Rankings.

Because of its popularity, Craigslist.org is one of the most target sites of spammers. Craigslist has been upgrading its system continuously to fight against the spammers. When you post the same ads on different locations or multiple ads on a particular location, your post will be marked as flag and will be removed from the list. This makes the ad posting in Craigslist difficult... Anyhow, here are some tips in advertising on Craigslist:

Unique Email address - Use a different email address for each ad post.

Different Ad Descriptions - Make the ad unique every time you post to avoid "similar posting" error and staff deletion.

IP Address - Change your IP as frequently as possible. If a lot of ads are posted using a single IP, it will be blocked for a few hours to a few days, even permanently if abused persistently. Some post with the use of foreign IPs can be detected and are auto-deleted by Craigslist software.

Ad Titles - Titles should match the category. And make sure you are using a lot of different titles. This reduces the possibility of the post to be flagged.

Don't post more than 10-20 ads at a time. Give some time interval between each batch of postings.

Select your posting category appropriately. Postings on wrong categories are flagged and deleted hastily. Make sure you do some research to determine the appropriate category for your business.

Don't post many ads frequently. Over exposure is not a good idea.

Make sure your ads doesn't look spammy and is just like any simple ads on the net. There are times that too much commercial looking ads can be flagged unless you are posting under the "services offered" category.

Avoid using keywords in your titles or ad descriptions. A company name, phone number or email address, etc… will do.

Additional Tips in Advertising on Craigslist:

The title may compose up to 70 characters.

The ad description is up to 30kb.

Javascript and CSS is not allowed.

You cannot use a flash image in your ads. But a non-moving image or an animated GIF image will do.

After making an ad post, it will take about 15 minutes for your ad to go live on the listing.

If you cannot receive any email with the publishing link from Craigslist, check first your bulk/spam folder.

Do not format your text to appear in colored white. Or else, you will get a message that you are blocked. Also, making your text look white, like this: <p style="color: white;">, will convert your text to color black.

Frame and iFrame are not allowed also.

9 Step Process for Getting Authoritative Links

2007-08-26T21:43:00.000+08:00

There are many types of authoritative links, and different sites require different approaches for getting the link. But the main objective is to build your site into a stable authoritative domain. Here is a summary of the 9 step process to getting authoritative links through relationship building:

Build a list of authoritative sites that you would really like to get a link from.

Review the content and tools you currently have, or can easily develop.

Take your highest priority targets and do some research. Really understand what the site is about.

Make your first contact totally focused on helping them somehow, such as solving that stated need from the prior point. Simply help them, and ask for nothing in return.

Do it again, or perhaps even several more times.

Along the way make sure that they are aware that you have a related site (perhaps the site name is in your signature, for example).

After you have established a dialog with them, and they are really responding to you, send them an email that introduces your site, and the killer content and/or tools you think they may be interested in. Don't ask for a link, ask for an opinion, and ask for suggestions.

Respond to their suggestions. It's absolute gold if you can get them to suggest some tweaks that are easy to make. After you have made the changes they begin to feel some ownership in what you have.

The exact timing of the link request (if they have not linked to your site already) is a judgment call. But now you are in a good position to make the request.

Character Sets Issue

2007-08-26T21:42:00.001+08:00

Character Sets: We know we need an encoding tag for compliancy purposes, but which one?

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

If a site is doing is serving content, using UTF-8 is fine. By the way, ISO-8859-1 is actually a subset of UTF-8.

Where you can get into trouble is when you are *accepting* data from visitors from some foreign countries. The browser will re-encode any data the user enters into UTF-8 and send it back to the server. If your server can't handle UTF-8 encoded data, then you could run into some trouble. For example, if you are using a database backend and a user from China enters some Chinese characters into a form, then your database needs to know how to handle the UTF-8 encoded data it just received.

Any database will accept UTF-8 data because it is "byte oriented", but knowing what to do with the data, that is something completely different. The worst that could happen is that you lose some data from foreign customers and this is not good.

The search engines, and especially Google, will have an easier time indexing a page with the ISO-8859-1 statement, as Googlebot will not have to encode any data, which can be a lengthy process. What happens is that since the index is housed on US servers, having the UTF-8 statement forces an encoding process, even though no encoding data is present. Essentially, you are making Googlebot work harder than it should work.

Recommendation: Use the ISO-8859-1 tag on all US-based pages that will NOT serve foreign characters (i.e. forms). For pages that do server foreign characters, use the UTF-8 tag. It is suggested that on your form pages to use the UTF-8 tag and place all of your pages with forms in a separate folder. You will then exclude that folder from being indexed in the robots.txt file.

Why You Should Do This: Using the ISO-8859-1 tag on your content pages will allow for the spiders to index your site quickly and correctly while at the same time allow for the browser to display your code properly. Using the UTF-8 tag on your forms will allow for any foreign data to be passed to your database correctly.

List of Ping URLs

2007-08-26T21:41:00.004+08:00

Here's a list of ping URLs whenever you got new updates in your website:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

Changes to Track in a Website

2007-08-26T21:41:00.003+08:00

The topic about a website’s changelog is one of the interesting threads in the WebmasterWorld! The changelog has a vital role in SEO. Some may find it unimportant, but I believe this should be one of the things that we should be checking out once in a while.

Here are some ideas to track taken from the WebmasterWorld:

Every change to robots.txt

Every change to htaccess (or Internet Services Manager in IIS)

Site-wide template changes (especially menu changes)

DNS and hosting changes

New outbound links

Ad purchases and run-times

Last time all outbound links were checked to see what was on the other end

Last time site was checked for "poison" words

Change in titles, especially the home page

Server updates (especially reboots or outages)

New inbound links (one way or not)

Backup of files you have changed

Log of expense for each website

Config files (Apache, MySQL, php, etc.)

Firewall ruleset

All changes to all pages are logged one page per day

If you have some things to add, please write it in a form of a comment.

DTD Statements

2007-08-26T21:41:00.001+08:00

A DTD (Document Type Definition) Statement will go before the <HEAD> section of your web pages. This isn't just for your home page, but every page of your site.

A statement allows your site to get indexed faster and deeper in Google. Using it also shortens the time your site spends in the Sandbox by an average of 12 days. However, using an incorrect DTD Statement can hurt your site. For example, if you use a 4.01 statement, but your code was written in 3.2, the engine will make note of it and there is a strong likelihood that the page (or site) will be dropped or penalized.

Why It Works? When GoogleBot comes to your site and sees the DTD Statement, it knows how the code was written. Because it knows how the code is written, it can spider the site much faster. If every web page was compliant, Google could perform their massive monthly update and recrawl of the web much faster than the 4-5 weeks it currently takes.

The strongly recommend is the Transitional tag. It allows you some flexibility with code, especially with the use of GoLive and DreamWeaver.

Here's a recommended DTD statement to be used:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">

Social Bookmarking

2007-08-26T21:40:00.000+08:00

A trend that has spawned countless extremely popular web services. Among some of the more popular ones are Technorati, Del.icio.us and Flickr.

Basically, Social Bookmarking is the collective act of bookmarking (aka. "tagging") and sharing of internet links and resources by the internet population... you!

Different Social Bookmarking Services on the internet today allow people to upload, store, bookmark ("tag") and share everything from photos to news stories to links of interest.

Social bookmarking involves the use of Tags - subjects, categories, or words assigned to various Objects. An Object is often a link (URL) to a particular webpage relevant to the Tag it is assigned to. However, an Object can also be any relevant piece of data or information (like MP3 files for instance).

I recommend the Tag Generator & Social Bookmark Link Creator!

Just provide the following info:

Keywords - separated by commas

Article URL - the complete URL of the article

Article Title

Then click the "Generate Code" button after reviewing the inputted data and wait for your code to be generated. Copy the generated code and paste that to your page!

Google Sitemap Errors

2007-08-26T21:38:00.005+08:00

Here are a list of Google Sitemap errors straight from the Webmaster Tools of Google. Click your error and fix them immediately!

Compression error

Empty Sitemap

Invalid attribute value

Invalid date

Invalid tag value

Invalid URL

Invalid URL: We've detected that a Sitemap you've listed doesn't include the full URL.

Invalid XML: too many tags

Missing XML attribute

Missing XML tag

Nested indexing

Parsing error

Temporary error

Too many Sitemaps

Too many URLs

Unsupported file format

URL not allowed

Paths don't match: We've detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that doesn't include the www prefix.

Paths don't match: We've detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that includes the www prefix.

Incorrect namespace

Leading whitespace

A specific HTTP error

Google Sitemap Sample

2007-08-26T21:38:00.003+08:00

The following sample shows a Google Sitemap code in XML format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset

   xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"

   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"

   xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84

   http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">

<url>

   <loc>http://www.seocebu.com/</loc>

   <lastmod>2007-04-02T03:06:58+00:00</lastmod>

   <changefreq>daily</changefreq>

   <priority>1</priority>

</url>

<url>

   <loc>http://www.seocebu.com/category/announcements/</loc>

   <lastmod>2007-04-02T11:06:58+00:00</lastmod>

   <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

   <priority>0.9</priority>

</url>

<url>

   <loc>http://www.seocebu.com/contact/</loc>

   <lastmod>2007-04-02T11:06:58+00:00</lastmod>

   <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

   <priority>0.3</priority>

</url>

<url>

   <loc>http://www.seocebu.com/1/hello-cebu/</loc>

   <lastmod>2007-03-28T11:58:24+00:00</lastmod>

   <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

   <priority>0.5</priority>

</url>

</urlset>

You can compress your Google Sitemap files using gzip. Compressing your Sitemap files will reduce your bandwidth requirement. Please note that your uncompressed Sitemap file may not be larger than 10MB.

Google Sitemap Format

2007-08-26T21:38:00.001+08:00

The Google Sitemap Protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.

The Sitemap must:

Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.

Include a <url> entry for each URL as a parent XML tag.

Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

The available XML tags are described below.

<urlset>

Required.

Encapsulates the file and references the current protocol standard.

<url>

Required

Parent tag for each URL entry. The remaining tags are children of this tag.

<loc>

Required

URL of the page. This URL must begin with the protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if your web server requires it. This value must be less than 2048 characters.

<lastmod>

Optional

The date of last modification of the file. The accepted date formats are:

Complete date:

YYYY-MM-DD (eg 2007-03-16)

Complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds:

YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD (eg 2007-03-16T19:20:30+01:00)

<changefreq>

Optional

How frequently the page is likely to change. This value provides general information to search engines and may not correlate exactly to how often they crawl the page. Valid values are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and never.

The value "always" should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value "never" should be used to describe archived URLs.

<priority>

Optional

The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites, and only lets the search engines know which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl of your pages in the way you would most like.

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Please note that the priority you assign to a page has no influence on the position of your URLs in a search engine's result pages. Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index.

Also, please note that assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site will not help you. Since the priority is relative, it is only used to select between URLs on your site; the priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites.

Resubmit Google Sitemap

2007-08-26T21:37:00.004+08:00

When the sitemap file of your website changes, you can resubmit it to Google to let them know about the updates of your pages. Resubmit your Sitemap in one of two ways:

Sign into Google Sitemaps with your Google Account and from the "Sitemaps" tab, select the checkbox beside it and click the "Resubmit Selected" button. The Submitted date will update to reflect this latest submission.

Send Google an HTTP request. If you do this, you don't need to use the "Resubmit" link in your Google Sitemaps Account. The Submitted column will continue to show the last time you manually clicked the link, but the Last Downloaded column will be updated to show the last time the Google system has fetched your Sitemap.

To resubmit your Sitemap using an HTTP request:

Issue your request to the following URL:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

For example, if your Sitemap is located at http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz, your URL will become:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.gz

URL encode everything after the /ping?sitemap=:

www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.gz

You can issue the HTTP request using wget, curl, or another mechanism of your choosing. A successful request will return an HTTP 200 response code; if you receive a different response, you should resubmit your request. The HTTP 200 response code only indicates that Google has received your Sitemap, not that the Sitemap itself or the URLs contained in it were valid. To obtain status information about your Sitemap, resubmit it using your webmaster tools account. We recommend that you resubmit a Sitemap no more than once per hour. An easy way to do this is to set up an automated job to generate and submit Sitemaps on a regular basis.

Note: If you are providing a Sitemap index file, you only need to issue one HTTP request that includes the location of the Sitemap index file; you do not need to issue individual requests for each Sitemap listed in the index.

Google Sitemap Limits

2007-08-26T21:37:00.003+08:00

You can provide multiple Sitemap files, but each Sitemap file that you provide must have no more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. These limits help to ensure that your web server does not get bogged down serving very large files.

If you want to list more than 50,000 URLs, you must create multiple Sitemap files. If you anticipate your Sitemap growing beyond 50,000 URLs or 10MB, you should consider creating multiple Sitemap files. If you do provide multiple Sitemaps, you can list them in a Sitemap index file. A Sitemap index file can list up to 1,000 Sitemaps.

Add Google Sitemap

2007-08-26T21:37:00.001+08:00

The first time you submit a Sitemap to Google (whether you created it using the Sitemap Generator, a third-party tool, or manually created it), you must submit it by adding it to your Google webmaster tools account. This enables Google to provide you with useful status and statistical information. From your account, you can see if there are problems with your Sitemap or with any of the URLs listed in it. If you are adding a Mobile Sitemap, you must specify the markup language for the URLs contained in the Sitemap.

When you make changes to your Sitemap, you can resubmit it using your Google webmaster tools account or you can resubmit it using an HTTP request.

These steps describe how to add a Sitemap that contains URLs for non-mobile content (this includes most websites). There are additional steps for Mobile Sitemaps.

Once you have a Sitemap in one of the supported formats:

Upload your Sitemap to your site in the highest level directory you want search engines to crawl, generally the root. If you list URLs in your Sitemap that are at a higher level than your Sitemap location, Google will be unable to include those URLs as part of the Sitemap submission.

Sign into Google Sitemap tools with your Google Account.

Add your site to your account.

Click the "Add a Sitemap" link beside the site.

Choose the "General Websitemap" option.

Type the URL to your Sitemap location in the provided field. Make sure you include the entire URL, such as http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.

Click "Add Websitemap."

Google ensures the URL is reachable and displays the My Sites page. From this page, you can see the number of Sitemaps you've added for each site and if any of them have errors.

To view the lists of Sitemaps you've added for a site, click the number in the Sitemaps column beside the site. You can also click the site and then click the "Sitemaps" tab. The "Sitemaps" tab for that site opens. When you initially add a Sitemap, the status displays as Pending. Once Google processes your Sitemap (which may take several hours), this status will change to either OK or to an error. If you receive an error, click on it to view additional information.

Fix Supplemental Index in Google

2007-08-26T21:34:00.001+08:00

Need help on how to fix the supplemental index in Google? Here are questions for you to analyze about the contents in all your web pages:

Do you refresh it regularly?

Are you careful not to over seed it with keywords?

Does the content reflect and support the headlines, page title, and meta tags?

Do your links conform to the best-linking practices described in the other articles in the Linking School?

Are you sure that none of your links leads to questionable domains or bad neighborhoods?

Do you add new links on a steady, incremental basis?

If you are getting out-ranked by your own content pages, then it is very possible that you are in Google's Supplemental Index!

You might be asking two simple questions:

How did I get into the supplemental index?

How do I get out of Google's supplemental index?

Here are my speculations in your web pages:

You have little unique text on your web pages (maybe a lot of images, and little text)

Duplicate content - copied contents from other sites

Your title tags and meta description tags are all identical

Your pages have similar header, sidebar, and footer sections

Your pages are dynamically generated from a database

Possibly most of your links are reciprocal links, and you got a few one way incoming links.

Orphaned web pages, which are pages that no one links to, including your domain.

Here are my solutions to get out of Google's supplemental index:

Rewrite your title tag and meta description tag for each webpage and make them unique.

Add unique contents to your web pages. For the copied contents, rewrite them by simply rephrasing the sentences.

Make sure that you don't have orphaned web pages.

Remove excess on-page optimizations.

After your changes, it's time to update your sitemap file and resubmit it to Google. This is the best way to get out of the supplemental hell!

www and non-www URL Issues

2007-08-26T21:33:00.003+08:00

To avoid canonical issues, you need to use a mod_rewrite string. A simple 301 works on single URLs but does not handle the site-wide canonical issues. You can go to your browser and type in "seocebu.com" and you will be redirected to "www.seocebu.com". Here is a code direct from our HTAccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

   RewriteEngine On

   RewriteBase /

   RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.seocebu\.com [NC]

   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.seocebu.com/$1 [L,R=301]

</IfModule>

Google penalizes for duplicate content. If they have two versions of one of your pages indexed, the www and non-www version, you are tagged with duplicate content, even though it is just one page. Also, this will help consolidate your link popularity as well. If you allow for canonicalization to occur on your site, you will have one level of link popularity for the www version and another level for the non-www version. This could even push your PageRank up in 3-4 months.

Hide Javascript and CSS Codes

2007-08-26T21:33:00.001+08:00

Make sure that you send JavaScript and CSS to external files. Therefore, hide your javascript and css codes! There is no reason to clutter up your code and increase your page sizes. If you have the same JavaScript for a menu and the same CSS on each page, not only is that taking up space on your server, your transfer rate will be higher than it needs to, but you are also cluttering up Google's index. With over 110,000 servers running their index, Google estimates that with duplicate content, scraper sites, repeated JavaScript and CSS information, their index size is 28% larger than it has to be. That is about 30,000 servers.

Sample of external JavaScript code:

<script src="ExternalJS_1.js" language="javascript" type="text/javascript">

</script>

Sample of external CSS code:

<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

Avoid CSS tricks such as keyword stuffing, etc.

Power of Robots.txt File

2007-08-26T21:30:00.004+08:00

The robots.txt file was designed to inform bots how to behave on your site. What information they can get, what information they can’t. It is a simple text file that is very easy to create, once you understand the proper format. This system is called the Robots Exclusion Standard.

To create your robots.txt file, use the Notepad or another text editor. DO NOT create your robots.txt file in an HTML Editor like DreamWeaver, GoLive or FrontPage. FTP clients usually convert the file into Unix mode, but there are occasions when it will fail.

The two parts of a robots.txt file:

User-agent - This line specifies the robot.

For example:

User-agent: googlebot

You may also use the wildcard character " * " to specify all robots.

For example:

User-agent: *

You can find user agent names in your own logs by checking for requests to robots.txt. Most major search engines have names for their spiders.

Disallow – this consists of Disallow: directive lines. Just because the Disallow statement is there, doesn’t mean that the bot(s) are completely disallowed on the site. These lines can specify files and/or directories.

Examples below allows all robots to visit all files because the wildcard asterisk (*) specifies all robots.

User-agent: *

Disallow:

To deny all robots out, use this!

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

To restrict all bots in downloading a particular web page, apply this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: secret.html

To deny a single bot? Let’s prohibit the bot named GYMbot!

User-agent: GYMbot

Disallow: /

To keep bots out of your images folder, do this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /images/

You can place comments in your robots.txt file. Any line that begins with # is considered to be a comment line and is ignored. I recommend this style of formatting the line and it follows as:

#Disallowing access to the scripts folder

Disallow: /scripts/

The robots.txt file should be placed in the root directory of your server. In other words, in the same place as your index.html file for your home page.

In about two weeks, you will begin to see improve spidering, a greater depth of indexing and even a rise in your rankings.

Wondering why in using a robots.txt file when you can use the meta-robots tag instead?

The meta-robots tag is not compliant to the needs of search engines and it is often not read. All the major engines and most of the minor engines look for the robots.txt and do their best to obey it.

Read about Meta Tags

Wordtracker Keyword Tool

2007-08-26T21:30:00.003+08:00

The Leading Keyword Research Tool is Wordtracker!

With Wordtracker, you'll know the best keywords to drive more traffic to your sites.

Here are some terms that you will come across with this tool:

KEYWORD EFFECTIVENESS INDEX (KEI)

This compares the Count result (number of times a keyword has appeared in the Wordtracker data) with the number of competing web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are most effective for your campaign.

The higher the KEI, the more popular your keywords are, and the less competition they have. Which means you have a better chance of getting to the top.

Count

This shows the number of times a particular keyword has appeared in the Wordtracker database.

24hr

This is the predicted daily traffic for each keyword in this search engine only.

Competing

Each keyword has been submitted to the search engine and the number of competing web pages given in response.

The lower the competition the easier you will find it to reach the top using this keyword.

Recommended Free Keyword Tools

2007-08-26T21:30:00.001+08:00

Here are some recommended free keyword tools for you to use:

Google Keyword Tool

The Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Start your search by entering your own keyword phrases or a specific URL.

Overture Keyword Selector Tool

Try the Overture Keyword Tool now!

Free Wordtracker Keywords

2007-08-26T21:27:00.002+08:00

The Free Wordtracker Keywords generate up to 100 related keywords and an estimate of their daily search volume. But, the adult terms have been removed from the results.

Visit the Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker.

Here is the formula Wordtracker used to estimate the daily search volume for any given keyword:

Legend:

A = Number of times keyword appears in the Wordtracker database

B = Total number of keywords in the Wordtracker database

C = Estimated total number of daily queries on all search engines*

D = Estimated daily volume of searches for the keyword

(A / B) x C = D

So for a keyword that appears 9,000 times in the Wordtracker database, this is the number of daily searches that they predict:

Let,

A = 9,000

B = 319.4 million

C = 563.4 million*

D = 15,873 daily searches

Therefore:

(9,000 / 319.4 million) x 563.4 million = 15,873 daily searches

Every day, on average, Wordtracker collects about 3.55 million search terms from Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com, who according to Netapplications.com account for 0.63% of searches across all engines. By combining these two figures, Wordtracker estimates that the total daily searches across all engines is 563.4 million.

If you are using Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox 2, you can add the Wordtracker Keywords search to your browser.

Click here to install to your browser now!

Fake PageRank Detection Tool

2007-08-26T21:27:00.001+08:00

Domain Names are big business these days, and PageRank fraud is becoming a serious problem. When someone is offering a domain name for sale, they can artificially inflate the domain's PR. It is achieved when offending domains use a 301 or 302 redirects that point their sites to sites with a high PageRank. This is a well known trick in the SEO world, but people who aren't familiar with SEO are most likely to fall for this.

Use the Fake PageRank Detection Tool to check and see the real PageRank of a site now!

Google PageRank Prediction

2007-08-26T21:26:00.000+08:00

iWebTool’s Google PageRank Prediction tool does what it says, it predicts your future Google PageRank. This tool will provide an estimation of the future PageRank and should not be considered precise.

Go to iWebTool and try their Google PageRank Prediction Tool.

You can also read about the prediction for the next Google PageRank update at SeoCompany.ca!

Inbound Link Quality Rating Tool

2007-08-26T21:23:00.000+08:00

Information about the Firefox ILQ Rating Tool Extension:

Provides you the ILQ (Inbound Link Quality) rating of the current site showing in your browser.

A web-based ILQ Rating Tool

This tool shows the number of inbound links in Yahoo, DMOZ, gov and edu that a particular site you can see on your browser has.

v1.1 ILQ Firefox extension now works with Firefox v2.0

Download FireFox ILQ 1.1 Rating Extension from SEOcompany.ca!

SEO for Firefox

2007-08-26T20:59:00.000+08:00

The SEO for Firefox tool was designed to add more data to Google and Yahoo! to make it easier to evaluate the value and competitive nature of a market. SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a more holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market right from the search results. In addition to pulling in useful marketing data this tool also provides links to the data sources so you can dig deeper into the data.

If you are casually surfing please turn this extension off. Only turn it on if you are actively researching a market.

In the status bar at the bottom of Firefox you can click the SEO for Firefox logo to turn it on or off.

If it is colorful it is on.

If it is gray it is off.

This extension also has courtesy settings which allow you to ping search engines for data at a slow rate. You probably want to set the delay to at least 1 or more seconds. If you set it at 0 do not be surprised if some of the engines at least temporarily block you for scraping data.

SEO for Firefox Features:

Pulls useful market research data right into Google's and Yahoo!'s search results, including the following data near each search result.

PR: (Google PageRank) an estimated measure of global link authority

Age: age pulled from Archive.org, shows the first time a page was indexed by Archive.org's spider. The theory is that if Archive.org found a page so did many of the major search engines.

Links: (Yahoo! linkdomain) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a domain

.edu Link: (Yahoo! .edu linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a domain

.edu Page Link: (Yahoo! .edu link ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .edu links pointing at a specific page

.gov Link: (Yahoo! .gov linkdomain ) shows a rough estimate of the total number of .gov links pointing at a domain

Page Links: (Yahoo! link) shows a rough estimate of the total number of links pointing at a page

del.icio.us: number of times a URL has been bookmarked on Del.icio.us. Heavily skewed toward techy / Web 2.0 stuff.

Technorati: an estimate of the total number of links to a site from blogs

Alexa: rank based on website traffic. Heavily skewed toward internet marketing and webmaster related resources.

Cached: (Google site:) shows how many pages from a site are indexed in Google

dmoz: searches the Google Directory to count the total number of pages from a site that are listed in DMOZ, and the total number of pages listed in DMOZ that reference that URL.

Bloglines: shows you how many people are subscribed to a particular blog via Bloglines.

dir.yahoo.com: is a site listed in the Yahoo! Directory or not.

WhoIs: makes it easy to look up the whois data for any site.

Download SEO For Firefox now!

Search Status Tool

2007-08-26T20:33:00.000+08:00

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how many and every website in the world is performing. Designed for the needs of search engine marketing professionals, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.

SearchStatus lets you view its Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa Traffic Ranking, Alexa Incoming Links, Alexa Related Links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This combined search-related information means you can view not only the link importance of a site (according to Google), but also its traffic importance (according to Alexa), so providing a balanced view of site’s effectiveness.

The SearchStatus Mozilla/Mozilla Firefox extension appears discreetly at the bottom of the browser on the status bar. If you choose to view backward links for a particular page, they open in new tabs in the same browser window. Disable the automatic Google and Alexa queries and they fold away from view.

You can download it from Quirk.biz!

Useful Meta Tags in SEO

2007-08-26T20:29:00.003+08:00

Here are the useful meta tags in SEO:

<meta name="description" content="Description goes here.">

The meta description tells the site's description. The value of this meta is usually used in the SERPs but this is not true most of the time. Make your site description compelling! And its recommended that this should be with a maximum of 20 words.

<meta name="keywords" content="your 1st keyword, your 2nd keyword">

The meta keyword tells the bots that these are your targeted keyword. Google uses this as a reference for spamming within your page. It is recommended to consist with a maximum of 20 words also.

<meta name="robots" content="oodp">

If you use the meta-robots tag, don’t use the "index,follow" parameter. That is what a search bot does by default.

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">

Read more about this from Character Sets Information.

Useless Meta Tags in SEO

2007-08-26T20:29:00.001+08:00

Here are some useless meta tags in SEO:

<meta name="robots" content="index,follow">

This meta tells all the robots that visits the site to index the page and follow all the links in the page.

To tell the bots what to do:

index, follow - index the page, follow links

noindex, nofollow - don't include the page in your index, don't follow links

index, nofollow - index the page, don't follow links

noindex, follow - don't include the page in your index, follow links

Harmful Meta Tags in SEO

2007-08-26T20:28:00.000+08:00

Here is a harmful meta tag in SEO:

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0.5;URL=../index.htm">

This meta is used to redirect a page and the time for redirection will be mentioned.

If you want to redirect a page, read about 301 Redirect.

If you have some things to add, please write it in a form of a comment.

Specific Guidelines of Google on Quality

2007-08-26T20:26:00.001+08:00

Here are the Specific Principles of Google when it comes to Quality:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Don't send automated queries to Google.

Don't load pages with irrelevant words.

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Don't create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.

Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

If a site doesn't meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and request reinclusion.

Basic Principles of Google on Quality

2007-08-26T20:25:00.000+08:00

Here are the Basic Principles of Google when it comes to Quality:

Make pages for users, not for search engines.

Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.

In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc.

Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Google Quality Guidelines

2007-08-26T20:21:00.000+08:00

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Define Supplemental Index

2007-08-26T19:35:00.002+08:00

Google has two indexes: The Main Index and The Supplemental Index. The Supplemental Index is an area where there are pages that Google had difficulty: completely indexing, the page is "stale", or a variety of other issues. You can also look at the Supplemental Index as the last "holding ground" for a page before it gets dumped from the index completely.

How can you tell if your site has pages listed in the Supplemental Index? Here’s a Google hack that works as of the moment:

site:www.domain.com *** -view

Make sure you have a space before and after the three asterisks. If the hack isn't working, you have to drill down to the end of the site list (site:www.domain.com), and any pages in the Supplemental Index will have in green "Supplemental Result" listed.

Supplemental Index is NOT the Google Sandbox that new sites get thrown into. This is something completely different and sites young and old get pages thrown into the Supplemental Index, even we get pages in there. And it isn't always on purpose.

Supplemental Index can have top ranking. There are many cases where a Supplemental Index page has the #1 listing. So, if sites can still rank #1 and be in the Supplemental Index, why get out?

Define Supplemental Result

2007-08-26T19:35:00.001+08:00

According to Google, a supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it's pulled from our supplemental index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If you're a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there's no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn't affect its PageRank.

Read more about Supplemental Index to understand this...

Define Google Sitemap

2007-08-26T19:21:00.000+08:00

Google requires a sitemap file to websites for them to tell all the pages, information about those pages, which pages are the most important and how often they change. By submitting a Sitemap file to Google, you can take control of the first part of the crawling/indexing processes and that is to let Google discover your pages.

This may be particularly helpful if your site has dynamic content, pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, or if your site is new and has few links to it.

Sitemaps helps speed up the discovery of your pages, which is an important first step in crawling and indexing your pages, but there are many other factors that influence the crawling/indexing processes. Sitemaps lets you tell Google the information about your pages (which ones you think are most important, how often the pages change), so you can have a voice in these subsequent steps. Other factors include how many sites link to you, if your content is unique and relevant, if Google can crawl the pages successfully, and everything outlined in their webmaster guidelines.

A Sitemap provides an additional view into your site (just as your home page and HTML site map do). This program does not replace Google’s normal methods of crawling the web. Google still searches and indexes your sites the same way it has done in the past whether or not you use this program. Sites are never penalized for using this service. This is a beta program, so Google cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to their index. Over time, Google expect both coverage and time-to-index to improve as they refine their processes and better understand webmasters' needs.

Once you have created your Sitemap, you can add it to your Google Sitemaps account and update it as your site changes.

Keep in mind the following for Sitemaps of any format:

A Sitemap can contain a list of URLs or a list of Sitemaps.

If your Sitemap contains a list of other Sitemaps, you should save it as a Sitemap index file and use the XML format provided for that file type. A Sitemap index file cannot list more than 1,000 Sitemaps.

A Sitemap file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. If your Sitemap is larger than this, break it into several smaller Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server is not overloaded by serving large files to Google.

Specify all URLs using the same syntax. For instance, if you specify your site location as http://www.example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://example.com/. And if you specify your site location as http://example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://www.example.com/.

Completely specify each URL. For instance, include the protocol (such as http://) and include all required trailing slashes.

Do not include session IDs in URLs.

The Sitemap URL must be encoded for readability by the webserver on which it is located. In addition, it can contain only ASCII characters. It can't contain upper ASCII characters or certain control codes or special characters such as * and {}. If your Sitemap URL contains these characters, you'll receive an error when you try to add it.

Define PageRank

2007-08-26T19:20:00.000+08:00

PageRank™ is the heart of Google's software. This is a system for ranking web pages and it continues to provide the basis for all of Google's search tools.

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm which assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).

According to Google, PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

In other words, a PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links" is the term). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page, there is no support for that page.

The Google Toolbar's PageRank feature displays a visited page's PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10. Google has not disclosed the precise method for determining a Toolbar PageRank value. Google Software Engineer representatives have publicly indicated that the Toolbar PageRank is republished about once every three months, indicating that the Toolbar PageRank values are generally unreliable measurements of actual PageRank value for most periods of year.

Define Black Hat SEO

2007-08-26T19:19:00.000+08:00

Black Hat search engine optimization is the process of activities used to get higher search engine rankings in an unethical manner. Black Hat SEO is characterized in:

Breaking search engine rules and regulations.

Creating a poor user experience directly due to the bad techniques utilized on the website.

Unethical in presenting contents either in a visual or non-visual way to search engine robots and search engine users.

The Black Hat SEO practices will actually provide short-term gains in terms of rankings. But if you are discovered utilizing these spam techniques on your website, you run the risk of being penalized by search engines. Black hat SEO is a short-sighted solution to a long-term problem, which is creating a website that provides both a great user experience and all that goes with that.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms or by a manual review of a site.

Black Hat SEO is tempting! Tricks actually do work, temporarily. They do end up getting sites higher in search engine rankings, that is, until these same sites get banned for using unethical practices. It's just not worth the risk. Use efficient search engine optimization techniques to get your website ranked higher, and stay away from anything that even looks like Black Hat SEO.

Define SEM

2007-08-26T19:18:00.000+08:00

A brief definition of SEM:

Is the abbreviation of Search Engine Marketing

Is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Has three main methods which are Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Advertising (commonly known as Pay Per Click), and Paid Inclusion.

Define SEO

2007-08-26T18:33:00.000+08:00

A brief definition of SEO:

Is the abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization.

Is a subset of Search Engine Marketing.

Is a process of doing online activities to increase the amount of visitors to a website by ranking high in the search results of a search engine for targeted keywords with the ultimate goal of generating more revenue from the website.

It aims for long-term goals.

It has two types of SEO: White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO

Job titles working for SEO are: Linker, Linker Specialist, SEO Specialist, SEO Consultant, SEO Manager, SEO Programmer, SEO Web Designer, SEO Copywriter, SEO Creative Writer, etc.