Archive for April, 2005
The Ethics of SEO
Tuesday, April 5th, 2005I was reading Eric Ward’s website the other day and I’m really intrigued by what he does and the way he goes about it. He’s pretty well knonw as an SEO/linking guru and on his site he talks about his philosophy of linking, how it should not be automated and should reall invovle a lot of thought and personalization for each inidvidual site.
I am just getting into SEO and I’m trying to study and work at the same time, but I think this is a really interesting site and something all of us should think about as we embark on or carry out search engine optimization. There are so many quick-fix “solutions” out there, but nothing beats the quality of links searched for and built by hand.
His articles run the gamut from the legality of links to how to select sites to send link requests to pay-per-click, RSS and tons more. If you’re an SEO novice like I am or a more seasoned pro, there’s probably something useful for you on this site, even if it’s just a reminder that building links the right way can almost be an art form.
Analyzing Competitor Backlinks
Tuesday, April 5th, 2005Ever wondered what Anchor Text your competitors are targetting?
Check out the Yahoo Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer.
Using this tool you can see what backlinks your competitors have and more importantly the anchor text.
Ask Jeeves Expanding
Tuesday, April 5th, 2005Ask Jeeves plans to expand further into the European Search Market.
“International expansion is an important component to our corporate growth strategy,” said Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask Jeeves Inc. “We believe the Ask Jeeves brand has a tremendous opportunity to succeed in Europe because it offers the only differentiated world-class search experience to consumers.”
(via Yahoo)
Will be interesting to see if Ask can deliver a “differentiated world-class search experience”. Google has a huge foothold in Europe already.
Google Offers Video Uploads
Tuesday, April 5th, 2005In an effort to prepare for Video search – Google announced that it will soon begin hosting video uploading for users.
Like Google’s recent library project scanning volumes of books, the company’s video ambitions highlight its broad plans to digitize the world’s content and make it searchable. It also foreshadows a heated race with rivals Yahoo and Microsoft to be the de facto service for finding information wherever it resides: television, the Internet, cell phones or other convergence devices.
(via News.com)
Keyhole becomes Freehole
Tuesday, April 5th, 2005Google has announced that Keyhole, its satallite imagery, will now be incorporated into its maps section.
Until now, users were charged $29.95 to utilize the satellite technology, which displays actual satellite images of a given address. The images used are six to twelve months old, so don’t worry about Big Brother (or your little sister) checking in on you.
Once you pull up the satellite image (which can be done by clicking on the “satellite” link in the upper right hand corner), you can zoom in and out and scroll around in order to see the location’s proximity to the water, railroad tracks, shopping complexes and the like.
While the address pointer on the satellite photo isn’t always necessarily directly on the address (for my house, the pointer was about a block north of where my house actually is), it’s a great way to get visual bearings that aren’t easy to gain on a street map.
This is just one more reason Google is tops in my book.
Incorporating Meta Tags
Friday, April 1st, 2005How to Incorporate Meta-Tags Into Your Site
By Tom Baurley
Meta-tags seem to be an item of debate these days. I still recommend using them and will go the extra distance for my web site clients by including them. Meta Tags are those embedded tags within the Header of your html page script. These pages were created to help index your web site and web page information on search engines so that they can be found easily. Some coders say that today, many major search engines overlook the meta-tags. I disagree, because its still and edge that is built into search engine spiders, but certain parameters should be paid attention to such as # of keywords, particular words, and order of importance.
In HTML you don’t end the <meta> tags. In XHTML you have to. The <meta> tags go inbeween the <head> and </head> tags of your html script.
The keywords are a list of keywords you should list in order of importance, that your site should be found under. The description is a description of your site. Author is the author of the web page. A meta refresh is a meta tag you can use to automatically refresh or transfer your page to another page to load. Though be careful of meta refreshes, they are a quick way to get your page removed from a search engine listing.
Examples:
<HEAD>
<TITLE> SEO Updates </TITLE>
<Meta name=”author” content=”Tom Baurley”>
<Meta name=”description” content=”An article about Meta tags and coding them into your html document.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta name, metaname, meta tag, metatag, keywords, author, descriptions, search engine optimization, SEO, advertising, search engine, search engines, optimization”>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”5″ /> <!— Refreshes page every 5 seconds —>
</HEAD>
Good luck!
