Search Engine People

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Sitemaps Make Your Site Search Engine Friendly

by Shannon Hutcheson.

What is a Sitemap?

A Sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URLs of your website with additional metadata about each URL. It is useful for every site (or blog) to have a sitemap because it is an easy way to keep the search engines informed on when a page was last updated, how often it is updated, and how important it is in relation to the other URLs of your site.

Google first introduced Sitemaps in June 2005 so web publishers could publish lists of links from their sites. Shortly afterward, MSN and Yahoo announced joint support for the Sitemaps protocol along with Google. Sitemaps are now everywhere on the net, not just on the corporate business site.

Delicious Count WordPress Plugin … for Tracking and Improving Blog Post Quality!

by Jeff Quipp.

How can you really tell if the quality of your blog posts are improving over time? This is after all, a key objective of blogging.

In reality, it depends on what you’re hoping to accomplish.

If you’re blogging to:

1. generate affiliate and content network revenues, the answer is obvious.
2. to drive the bottom line ultimately by positioning yourself as an authority in your industry, you’ll need to routinely publish Resource type posts (see Types of Social Media Content). Unfortunately, its not as easy to track the quality of a Resource post as it is to track the quality of an Entertainment/Sensationalized post.

The Economic Impact of Search

by Ruud Hein.

There are businesses with a rock solid presence and value that won’t have to worry about search and its meaning at all. Take the depanneur here at the corner of the street, your typical corner store with milk, bread, and other assorted useful stuff. I know it’s there. You don’t – and the reason you don’t is because you don’t need this one.

When we’re in need of a corner store there’s no reason to pick up the Yellow Pages or get Google buzzing; you know.

But obviously we also have business that should worry about search and its meaning.

Match and Game! Google Automatic Keyword Match

by The Doug.

So there I was, minding my own business, when all of a sudden I had a conversion on one of my campaigns (ALWAYS exciting) but I couldn’t attribute it to any of the keywords in the adgroup it was showing up for.  “Well!  How can THAT be?!”, says I.

After running a search query to investigate further, I found the little miracle keyword that so silently and wonderfully threw a conversion my way.  I found it, and it was not a broad, exact, or even phrase match.  It was Automatic.  That’s right!  It’s not an option that you just choose like the others, but in fact a beta that Google inserted on various accounts with the “you need to do nothing in order for this feature to be turned on” type of message.

Building Search Engine Friendly Sites: Common Questions

Guest post by Jordan Kasteler.

Recently, I spoke at SES San Jose on “building a search engine friendly website” with emphasis focused on the incorporation and embedding of multimedia. Before narrowing my speech down to multimedia I had researched some common questions beginner SEOs or Web developers diving into SEO have when learning to build search engine friendly.

Below are a few common questions I came across and are addressed specifically:

What are common errors that beginners make when designing their “search friendly” site?

1) Using images, Flash, JavaScript, iFrames for to display navigation or textual content. Bots can’t crawl content or links embedded with these technologies though Flash capabilities have been significantly improved lately for Google.

Link Building 101: The Power of Directories

by Paul Teitelman.

Directory submissions are still one of the most powerful and safest link building strategies in existence. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find quality directories to submit too as many directories continue to get penalized by Google as I outlined in my last post, the History of Paid Directories.

As a result, the goal of this three-part series is to focus on the power of directories for SEO, and more importantly, to teach any SEO enthusiast how to find quality directories (both paid and free) going forward. Here’s what you can expect from this three part series:

Search and Teaching Your Kids to Research

by Ruud Hein.

To kick in an open door, whether we think instant access to instant information is good or bad, beneficial or not, it’s a fact of the matter.

That means that at any given time your children and mine are likely to access the World Wide Web in order to answer a question, find school material, corroborate facts, and learn.

Search + Research = Skill

Searching the web to find responsible, verifiable, genuine information of the professional or educational kind is a skill. Like all skills, it’s an acquired one.

Don’t Leave Home Without It: 8 Steps for Making Your Site Mobile Friendly

Guest post by Pierre Far.

I’ve been thinking about making websites mobile-friendly lately. It’s been brewing for a year and it registered as a major issue back in March when I got a new mobile phone and actually started using the web while mobile. Let me tell you this: most sites, mine included, suck when viewed on a mobile phone. It’s a horrible experience, and given the astonishing rise in mobile use, you and I, the people who build websites, better get our act together.

Nofollow 101 – Understanding the Nofollow Tag, for Beginners

by Shannon Hutcheson.

What is Nofollow?

Nofollow is an html attribute first introduced in 2005 by Google. Originally, the rel=”nofollow” attribute was added to discourage comment spam in blogs. Links with nofollow should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine.

From the Google Blog:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

9 Ways Search Engines Can Personalize Your Search Results

by Jeff Quipp.

Traduction francaise: 9 Façons possibles pour les Moteurs de Recherche de Personnaliser vos Résultats de Recherche

Personalization of search results is very important to the future success of any search engine, and its an effort well underway with many of the big 3 search engines as we speak.

If its true that the key success factors of search are:

a. reliability
b. ease/speed of use

Then it stands to reason that the more often a search engine provides searchers with the exact information they are looking for, the more often they are to use that search engine in the future, and the less likely they are to switch to another search engine.