Internet Marketing, Web Design and SEO

New 0.9 sitemap protocol

I recently recieved an email from one of my newsletter’s I stay up on. I wanted to just do a repost on this as I thought the whole thing was really great.

Last week, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to support the Sitemap 0.9 protocol. How can this new standard help you to improve the ranking of your web site in search engines?

What are sitemaps and what is the Sitemaps protocol?

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.

In its simplest form, a sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL:

• when it was last updated
• how often it usually changes
• how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site

This helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site.

The Sitemaps 0.9 protocol is a new standard that will make it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all search engines.

How can you benefit from this new standard?

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

The sitemap allows you to inform search engines about the pages on your web site. Depending on how your web site is structured, it can be easier for search engines to find all of your web pages if you use a sitemap.

Does using the Sitemaps 0.9 protocol improve your search engine rankings?

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that your web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Thank you axandra!!!!

Click distance and the importance of a sitemap

Click distance is basically the number of clicks from the home page to find a certain landing page.

Example: if you want to navigate to a certain page but literally need to click on a link from the home page then on a link to the secondary page then to a link to a third page just to find the page you are looking for then KNOW THIS… the search engines spiders have to as well.

Now many SEO’s might be saying why does this matter? What matters is most spiders only go 1-2 levels deep which means that if they have to follow a link 3-5 pages deep most likely they are NOT being cached and indexed unless these pages have inbound links to them.

What this means is that you may have hundreds or thousands of pages that are very possibly not being indexed and cached and could be affecting your rankings by. This means less of your pages will rank for certain keyword terms and less traffic to your site.

Needless to say us SEO’s need a way to get around this because we cannot always put a link to all of our pages on the bottom of our homepage. What we CAN do though is create a sitemap PAGE and link that from the home page. This sitemap page is essentially a spider bit for all of your internal page’s. I have attempted and tested this solution and it seems to work very well for me.

tip: if you want to step up your seo game and really see some results, try getting some inbound links for your internal pages. Now you wont need many but if you can get a few then you will surely see a great result for your site!

If you would like some verification on “click distance” please check out a patent put out by MSN. Click here.
SEOTEAM

Page rank search worth vs. Page Rank paid advertising worth.

I read an interesting post by Matt Cutts today which included a few great points on page rank which is pretty widely accepted by most seo’s but hasn’t caught on by the general public.

Google’s algo is always changing and it’s ability to update the Page Rank of sites is most USUALLY out of sync with its search engine updates. Just because you see a brand new PR number on that great little toolbar doesnt mean that your search engine results are going to be any better. PR does not influence a sites ranking and results in the SERP’s. Here is how matt put it.

“At any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users. […]

By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point.”

Matt also goes on to discuss how “You don’t have to care about PageRank”. Why would he say something like this? It’s because page rank is just a number that does not influence you in the serps like most people think.

Inbound links, Page Copy, Site structure, keyword density and proximity are just a few of hundreds if not thousands of things that rate, rank and apply a site page rank.

One thing I would strongly recomend is first looking at your target audience and the competitiveness of your keywords. If you have a PR6 site but your terms are “auto insurance” or “blue bear winter home schooling” the most important thing is to evaluate how the site is doing in general and not base it on PageRank.

While doing my work for a major dot come I thumbed through thousands of SERP’s and one thing that amazed me is that some sites with little to NO PageRank came up above sites with low to mid PageRank. Here is what Matt says about PageRank.

“I think that’s a perfectly healthy attitude. If you don’t care about PageRank and your site is doing well, that’s fine by me. ”

Now this is the fun part. Because most people don’t know this or are to hard headed to believe this we have a group of people out there exploiting paid linking for sites.

An example would be a PR5 site that does NOT rank for any of its keyword terms and backlinks are not that decent but may have many links OR may be using black hat techniques. This type of site might charge you 100$ or more dollars to place a text link on there site BUT is definitely NOT worth it but because people believe (especially link popers) that the higher PR a site has, if we place our link on it then it will help our site more. This is FALSE!!!!

The best way to increase your own PR and your OWN SERP’s is to maintain a strong quality linking campaign. Text link ads put out a pretty good checklist and is pretty similar to the one posted at www.directoryrevolution.com. I would check it out because it might save your sites LIFE!

Meanwhile people will continue to make a fortune off of selling text link ads based on PR.

Till next time,

SEO TEAM

Googles supplemental results and how to fix them.

I found a great article that I am going to repost now. I don’t normally do this but axandra put together some great information and I want to share it with you now.

Google uses two indexes for its search results. The normal index and the supplemental results index.

What are Google’s supplemental results and what’s the problem?

Google defines supplemental results as follows:

“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.”

If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then it is likely that your web pages could not be parsed correctly by Google’s standard crawler.

The problem with Google’s supplemental results are that they are only supplemental. If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then they won’t be returned very often for regular search queries.

How to find out if your web pages are in the supplemental results

An easy way to find out how many of your pages are listed in Google’s supplemental results is to search for the following on Google.com:

site:www.domain.com ***

Search for that phrase and then proceed to the last result pages to find the supplemental results. Of course, you have to replace www.domain.com with your own domain name.

How to get out of Google’s supplemental results

Most web sites have pages in Google’s supplemental results. It means that Google had difficulty to index these pages or that Google had other problems with these pages.

1. Make sure that your web pages don’t contain any spam elements and that you don’t use any spam techniques to promote your web site. Using spam techniques to promote your web site is often the reason why a web site doesn’t get good rankings. Better focus on ethical search engine optimization.
2. Make it easy for search engines to index your web pages. If possible don’t use web page URLs that contain question marks or the & symbol. Make sure that the HTML code of your web pages offers what search engines need. Use IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer to prepare your web pages.
3. Make these pages easy to find for Google’s web crawler. The more links point to your web pages, the more likely it is that search engine crawlers fill find your web pages. Use ARELIS to get good inbound links to your site.

Most web sites have pages in Google’s supplemental results. The easier you make it Google to index your web pages the more pages of your site will be listed in Google’s normal results.

LINK BAIT AND THE IMPORTANCE OF DRAWING TRAFFIC

Trying to push traffic to your site can be an offely difficult one. When trying to get traffic to your site you have many options but why o why would someone want to come back to your site AFTER they get there? Why would someone bookmark your site? Why would someone tell another person about your site?

The answer is simple. You provide a service, a game or some other thing that is intensily interesting.

Some link bait I have created is some ranking tools for webmaster’s and seo’s. The tools I have created keep SEO’s and webmasters coming back everyday.

GE came out with some great link bait. It was a sketch pad for people who visit there website.

SEOmoz created a page strength tool to keep people coming back. Some people create flash games and videos.

The reason people do this is to get the return traffic which can increase your alexa rating and can increase your viral marketing.

My advice to anyone looking to get more traffic is to FIRST create some link bait. Possibly do a google search for link bait if you are looking for incoming traffic and inbound links.

The most common misconception to link bait is that the inbound links are going to help the site instead of just the page the sites link to. The link bait might be best on your home page actually if you are doing link bait for inbound links. Just some things to think about before you choose a link bait for your site.

Good luck!

Google SiteLinks

Just recently google started to include a set of links below some results to pages
within the site. These new additional links are called Sitelinks.

In the past you normally see a few normal listings that are internal links to another listing but they are indented. It looks like google is doing this to authority sites and not expert sites.

Google explains what a sitelink is on there webmaster page.

How do you compile the list of links shown below some search
results?

The links shown below some sites in our search results, called Sitelinks,
are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link
structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow
them to quickly find the information they’re looking for.

We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the
user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good
Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for
the user’s query, we won’t show them.

At the moment, Sitelinks are completely automated. We’re always working to
improve our Sitelinks algorithms,

Theories on how site links can be affected or changed.

1. Google might track the number of clicks for different results. If a web site
   gets a lot of traffic for a special keyword then the web site will get Sitelinks
   on Google’s result page.

   For example, if you use a special trademark term
   on your web pages that cannot be found on other web sites then many people will
   click on your web site in Google’s results when they search for that search
   term. It’s likely that your web site will get Sitelinks for such a search
   term.

2. The link architecture of a web site might help. Links at the top of the HTML
   source of a web site seem to have a better chance to be included as
   Sitelinks.
3. Google might use the Google toolbar to determine Sitelinks. The more often a
   page is bookmarked the more likely it is that these pages will be used as
   Sitelinks. Google’s toolbar can collect a lot of information about a web site.

These are just startup theories and there is no way to tell exactly how these links are calculated. Also it looks like these google site links are internal pages to authority sites but it seems this only affects trademarked sites.

New Social Bookmarking site CREATED by SEOTEAM

1. higher traffic level

2. higher pr

3. better back links

4. free to post

5. Not flagged or handjobbed by the SE’s

We are proud to have developed FAVED.net and look forward to a promising future in social bookmark development.

technorati tags:social, bookmarking, faved

Web 3.0?

Wikipedia said it first!!! Since the emergence of web 2.0 and its succesfullness has come to a boil wikipedia wants to be the first to announce the web 3.0.

It didnt make much since to me either but I can assure you that the meaning and the page will probably change in a year or more lol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_3.0

Web 3.0 is a term that has been coined to describe the Semantic Web which aims to “organize the world’s information” using a declarative ontological language such as OWL ^[1].

URL Query Change for google

There are 2 types of searchers. You have searcher A and searcher Z. Searcher A does not use any common operators like site: or info: but instead usings terms and phrases but no operators to refine searching capabilities. Then you have the Z searchers who do use the operators.

When you type in a url queery into the address bar and type lets say espn normally the querry process would look for espn.com. This was due to more A searchers.W

We have changed that query to no longer pull up a certain domain but to display a list of possible sites so it no longer execute’s the SITE: operator or INFO: operator.

Here is a image of a search with the new query string.

technorati tags:google, query, change

Google Base and Managing its impressions in googles search results

I was checking on the new blog created for google base by GOOGLE. One of the main reasons I was ever interested in google base is because of the ability to bring its results into googles results and froogle and google base results.

Due to recent search refinesments like Real estate refinesments in the google search, if you choose to refine a search then you should be getting results from google base.

As you can see it is a pretty lucrative idea if done right as you do not have to do any type of optimization to get your information to be number one now.

Here is a screenshot of the new management system within your google base account

technorati tags:google, base