Serious Search Engine Optimization
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on October 22, 2009
Yesterday, Google announced they have reached a deal with Twitter to include Twitter updates in search results.
“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data”.
If you have been sitting on the fence in regards to using Twitter, I recommend you start to explore it now. Something I’ll be doing a lot more of myself.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on October 1, 2009
Finally Google makes it easier to verify your site by using the file verification method within Google Webmaster Tools.
Just this afternoon they announced this change as well as a few others regarding their website verification process:
Previously, if your website returned an HTTP status code other than 404 for non-existent URLs, you would be unable to use the file verification method…..We’ve simplified the file verification process to eliminate the checks for non-existent URLs.
I’m glad they finally did this. I thought it was odd I was able to verify many of my sites just fine using Yahoo! and Bing’s file verification methods, but not with Google’s. It was actually rather annoying having to use the meta verification method every time, then later having to go remove it. This will make it a little easier to verify and manage my own, as well as many client websites in the future.
Now you can simply download the HTML file they provide and upload it to your site without modification. They’ll check the file, and if the contents are correct, that’s it, you’re done!
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on September 10, 2009
So you’ve created your first website and you want to know the quickest way to get it listed in the Google search results. Well never fear, getting your new website listed is easy!
The simplest way to get listed in Google’s index is by adding a link from another website to yours. Yes, it’s really that simple, even Google says so. So how do you going about doing that?
Here are 5 quick and easy ways to get your website listed:
Yes, this is the simplest and easiest way to get listed in Google! In some cases Google will index your website within a couple of days, but it can take several weeks to months depending on how often the Googlebot crawls the web pages linking back to your site. So the more links you get pointing to your website, the more likely you’ll be indexed quickly.
Just getting listed doesn’t necessarily mean you will also show up at the top of the search results though. One factor Google uses to determine who to list at the top is by the quantity and quality of links pointing back to a web page, so getting more links will also help with your website’s rankings as well as getting it listed with the other search engines such as Yahoo!, and Bing.
A couple of other ways to get listed is by submitting a sitemap to Google for the advanced techie types, or by submitting it directly to Google and the other major search engines.
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 10, 2009
On Google’s Official Webmaster Blog today, there was an announcement of the “secret project” a large team of Googlers have been working on over the last several months. They would like Webmasters to help test their next generation infrastrucure of Google web search.
There really aren’t many noticeable differences between the new infrastructure and the live Google search at first glance, however after trying a few searches you will indeed see different results returned.
The Google team is asking for your feedback on this new infrastructure, especially for individual searches queries made leaving your dissatisfied with the results. You can find the “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link at the bottom of the query results page. Some of the features aren’t working, however they would still like any feedback you may have. Don’t forget to include the project word caffeine somewhere in the form’s text box.
If you don’t like the current Google search, then now’s your chance to be heard and help build the next generation in web search!
Btw, this is also a great way to get a head-start on your SEO!
Posted by Wesley LeFebvre on August 7, 2009
I’ve had a draft post sitting here regarding WolframAlpha for several months now, and thought I’d better share it with you before it’s really old news.
I really like where they are going with WolframAlpha.com, as a web reference. Although the name and Internet address are terrible in regards to SEO. Previsously, before I saved a link to the web site, I had to search all over the web every time I wanted to look something up because I could never remember the name. We can only home they will come up with something easier to remember, type, and spell, in the long run.
This “computational search engine” gives us useful, easy to read statistics, and graphs that help answer specific questions such as: how far is the moon.
Hopefully you can see in the above image – it gives us: the current distance from earth, and the average distance from earth; among many other great stats.
Unfortunately, there were several search queries I made where no data was found. Information I would have expected to find specifically on this site. I’m sure information is being added to the database daily. Let’s just see if they come up with an more memorable name.
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