SEO To Become A Dinner Party Topic

Thanks to a ground-breaking agreement between Dell and Google, SEO may soon be a mainstream topic of conversation. Dell, the world's leading maker of personal computers, has announced that it is testing a pre-installed package of Google software, including a Google-powered Dell home page, Google Desktop Search, and a Google Toolbar.

While the home page and Desktop Search will be an undeniable boost to Google's share of the Search market, and maybe even a threat to Microsoft's desktop dominance, it's the pre-installation of the Google Toolbar that will be of most interest to SE marketers and optimizers around the world.

Currently a specialist 'industry tool' used predominantly by SE practitioners, the Google Toolbar may soon be automatically available to hundreds of thousands of mainstream computer users. As a result, Google PageRank and, by extension, search engine marketing and optimization look set to become part of mainstream vocabulary. (Well, maybe that's a little optimistic... Perhaps they're more likely to become part of the vocab of the computer savvy mainstream.)

So what does this all mean to SEO and SEM? In my humble opinion, the four most important implications of the Dell-Google agreement are:

1) Business decision makers will finally 'get' SEO

Although not overly helpful to SEMs and SEOs, Google PageRank is an ideal hook for busy decision makers. It's very simple (in that it's just a mark out of ten) and measurable, and it's just THERE; you don't have to go out of your way to see the PageRank of a site. It's exactly what decision makers need to get their collective heads around SEO. They don't have the time or inclination to understand the complexities of SERPs, IBLs, spiders, indexing, keyword phrases, metatags, article PR, SEO copywriting, etc. For better or worse, PageRank eliminates all shades of gray, leaving the two colors many decision makers understand best: black and white.

2) Business will become aware of the importance of PageRank

While most business decision makers are aware that a good search engine ranking is good for business, they're not yet aware that a bad PageRank is bad for business. But with the Google Toolbar at their disposal, they soon will be. Decision makers will immediately start to use PageRank as a one-shot assessment of the credibility and authority of every website they visit. And in the process, they'll become painfully aware of what their own PageRank says about their company.

3) Business will be more Search-proactive

Once decision makers realize that a bad PageRank is bad for business, they'll be more likely to be proactive about their search engine ranking.

4) More businesses will dedicate a budget to Search

PageRank will become just a part of 'doing business'. Just like TV, radio, and newspapers, it will be proactively communicating with decision makers, each and every day. While the mechanics of a high search ranking will remain a mystery to most, the Search DOMAIN will no longer be considered a black art, and SEMs and SEOs will no longer be considered witch-doctors. This will make decision makers far more comfortable dedicating a budget to Search (especially as they now have something measurable to grab a hold of - see point 1 above).

Conclusion

It appears that Google has once again made a very astute business decision. For better or worse, they've improved their position in Search and made significant inroads into the desktop software market. Will they threaten Microsoft's desktop dominance? We'll have to wait 'n see. Will they enrich the SEM / SEO industry? In my humble opinion, yes! Google may not be everyone's favorite search engine, but if they bring PageRank into the mainstream, the Search industry will finally attract the percentage of corporate advertising spend it deserves.

(See http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,18080942%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html for further details of the Dell-Google agreement.)

About the Author:
* Glenn Murray is an SEO copywriter and article submission and article PR specialist. Visit DivineWrite.com or ArticlePR.com for details.
Article Source: Free Articles Directory

I Can Get you Removed From Search Engines

One of my clients was talking to me today. He is using our search engine submission tool and was very confused as why his website was showing some weird string queries.

First background about his site. His site has been online since 2000 and is ranked very well on all search engines. He site is very much devoted to real estate.

Couple of days he discovered that his site shows some weird things. To protect my client website I will use (example.com).

What we have done is google “site:www.example.com”

This will show you how many urls of your website google has. However one search showed example.com/?link1=10

He was puzzled as to what the ?link1=10 actually means. So he called us and ask me about this weir stuff that was happening. I guess sometimes we go the extra mile for our clientsJ

What has happened?

What is this /?link1=10?. Nothing was indicating that he has this page on his website, in fact this exact page does not even exist, but yet google found it.

Page /?link1=10 or anything that has example.com/?something_goes_here are called string queries which are used to identify products or even real estate search for homes if customers can view homes on your website.

With result of google finding this weird page, google automatically lowered my client site to the unknown. Basically my client lost ranking from google and other search engines.

Why this happened?

Using sting queries you can simply remove any website from search results, however it will take time to do that. Your website first must return status code 200-OK. This 200 page is simply a soft lending page for your 404 page.

To give you an example, If you remove a page from your web-site and than you re-visit that page again it will show 404 error. In some cases you may set up a custom 404 page which results in “not found”.

To see what you have just go to your website and type “www.mysite.com/anythinguwant.html”.

This should return 404 page or custom 404 page.

But back to 202 pages. To see if your website returns 202 page, search for a tool online. Use "header checker" as your search term.

When you get result it should be similar to this: “HTTP/1.1 200 OK”. It has to show 200OK.

Here is how it works:

To remove pages from search engines you need to have a lots of duplicate content. When I say a lot, we are talking 100’s of pages of duplicate content. Simply one page has to be same as the other page and 3rd page has to be same as 4th pages…etc. They all have to be on your website.

So how this “hacker”..let’s call him that, did this. He did not have access to my clients server, but still he was able to remove his site.

What he has done is checked if his website returns 202 pages OK. If it did, he than assigned random pages to his domain name.

For example: example.com/index.html?haha=iwillremoveyou or example.com/index.html?link1page=330, or example.com/index.html?haha=link2page

You get the idea. What he has done, he has assigned a string query of “haha”. Than he copied all urls into some free hosting company and just wait and relax until search engine picks it up.

Form search engine point of view these are links that point to his domain. More links you have the quicker search engines return to your website.

Because these links were pointing to some new pages on his domain, search engine though that this was a duplicate page, and now there are two main pages, and suddenly his website dropped on all search engines.

See how easy that was? Guess what, MSN is very vulnerable to this! I am not sure if they fixed it yet. If you do this on MSN, it is almost guaranteed someone site will just disappear.

Rest of the search engines, google, msn, yahoo will just lower your ranking, but will not remove you. Not matter what , it is pain to get back to top search results.

How to fix it

You will need to do mod rewrite or 301 redirect .

About the Author:
Martin Lukac, represents EnginePromoter.com, http://www.EnginePromoter.com search engine marketing web-site for search engine optimization and website submission. Promote your website and get top rotating positions on over 250+ search engines, including a niche website submission. EnginePromoter.com also operates http://www.1AmericanFinancial.com and real estate portal http://www.RateEmpire.com
Posted: 27-02-2007
Article Source: ArticlesBase.com

Website Accessibility Important For Disabled Visitors

A study released by computing and disability charity, AbilityNet, found that people with disabilities favour the most accessible websites when using the Internet. A poll of over 100 people with disabilities showed that the disabled community use the Internet for information, shopping, banking and leisure, just like everyone else. However, most disabled users will spend their time and money only on businesses that cater to their needs with more accessible sites.

Demographics of UK's Disabled Audience

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that there are 610 million disabled persons worldwide. The European Parliament estimates that there are 37 million disabled individuals in the EU, over 50% of whom are of working age. 10.3 million UK residents declare that they have a limiting long-term illness. These numbers are significant enough to make anyone realise the potential audience they could be ignoring by creating websites that are hard to access.

Disability Discrimination Act

The Disability Discrimination Act ascerts that website owners have had a legal duty, since October 1999, to ensure that all services provided via their website are accessible to disabled people. Any company not complying with the accessibility guidelines could potentially open itself up to legislation and discrimination lawsuits from disabled customers.

Disability Rights Commission: User-friendly websites for all

The disability rights commission launched guidance yesterday on how to launch a website that is user friendly. The document, Publicly Available Specification (PAS) 78, was developed by the British Standards Institution (BSI) and sponsored by the Disability Rights Commission.

• Details on the PAS 78 can be found at http://www.bsi-global.com/PAS78

Common Accessibility Problems

Typical accessibility problems encountered by most disabled users include:

• Text size on some sites is hard-coded so that it cannot be easily enlarged
• Text labels attached to images Alt text are often uninformative or absent
• Pictures of text are often used instead of actual text
• Adverts and features made up of moving images distract visitors with a cognitive impairment
• Interactive presentations such as 'Flash Movies' present access problems for visitors who cannot use a mouse, are vision impaired or who use speech output or voice recognition software
• Mini programs embedded in the page such as JavaScripts prevent full access the sites.

Accessible websites are also search engine friendly, which means that by ensuring that your website is accessibility compliant you not only increase your potential audience but also optimise your website for higher search engine rankings.

If your website presents any of the above problems for users with disabilities, you are most likely alienating a very large customer segment. AccuraCast provides usability and accessibility consultation and design services. Feel free to contact us to discuss your website's accessibility.

Other articles to read:

• Could MSN Search Turn Into a Google Killer?
• Google Conversion Rates Lower Than AOL, MSN, Yahoo!

SEO Weekly

About the Author:
Farhad Divecha
Before founding AccuraCast, Farhad worked for and provided consulting services to a number of large and medium sized enterprises in the UK and USA including 3Com, Proctor & Gamble and Household (HFC, HSBC). He has over 7 years of experience marketing products and services online and offline.
Added: 18 Oct 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/39812.html

Do Search Engines Scare You?

What do the words "Search Engine" make you think of? I get immediate mind-pictures which vary but all have similar themes. Sometimes I see one of those tiny submarines which are used to explore the deepest parts of the ocean bed. I have this picture in my mind of the tiny submarine underwater in complete darkness apart from the beam of its searchlight which is probing the gloom. Other times I see a horse-drawn carriage driving through dense fog with only its weak lamp relieving the darkness. This scene is from a movie where the police are racing through London in search of Jack The Ripper. The final picture is of a line of policemen in old-fashioned uniforms advancing across a moor in darkness through rising mist with only their flashlight-beams to light their way.

It can get a bit scary inside my mind at times. If these were dreams rather than passing thoughts, they would probably be analysed as meaning an obsession with darkness and getting lost. Maybe the lights penetrating the darkness symbolise a fear of ignorance (or maybe a fear of getting found out). The obvious link is that these pictures all relate to a search of one kind or another. The first one might represent a search for knowledge, the second one is obviously the search for a criminal and the final one a search for clues at the scene of a crime.

Why would the words "search engine" conjure up these dark visions? If you look at the words we associate with search engines, I think the connection will be clear. We talk about "submitting" our websites to search engines. We don’t "send" our websites or "apply" to search engines or "register" our websites with search engines. We are submissive and the search engines dominate us.

We adopt this submissive posture and the search engines send their robots to "crawl" over our websites. Doesn‘t sound very pleasant does it? The future of your website is entirely in the power of these monsters. You have spent time and perhaps some cash getting your website ready for the visit. Your website, the shop window to your home business, has been tweaked and "search engine optimised", now you can do nothing except hope that your efforts will be rewarded with approval by these invisible inspectors.

Web site owners act as if the search engines are neighbourhood dignitaries: "We must tidy up, the search engines are coming to visit". An anxious time follows while your website, brushed, polished and optimised to the best of your ability, waits to greet these visitors. The most respected visitor is Googlebot. He causes most anxiety and is renowned for being unpredictable. Webmasters try to analyse the "Googledance" in the hope of making Googlebot's visit enjoyable. If we can get the mighty Googlebot to dance instead of merely crawling, he might give us a good report, but Googlebot can't seem to decide what algorithm he prefers. How are you supposed to get his feet tapping? Unfortunately, the search engines are not the most communicative visitors and you only realise they have carried out their examination when something (either good or bad) happens to your protégé's page rank.

The search engines are not like your school teacher who gives you a class test, they are more like the university Board Of Examiners: when you have passed or failed their test, you will never get to know which questions you got right or where your weakness lies. Further improvement will have to be a matter of guesswork but suppose your guess is wrong? You might destroy the very things which met with the search engines’ approval. Then you hear that the search engines don’t agree amongst themselves, so what pleases some of them might lose you points with others. Which ones should you try hardest to impress? Should you turn your website into some sort of private Googledancer and risk offending the rest of the robots? Would it be better to try to please one or two of the larger search engines or a big bunch of the lesser ones? Finally you hear a rumour that the search engines are changing their secret rules anyway but nobody knows what the changes will entail. You despair of ever satisfying the masters of your fate, you feel as if you are stumbling around in the dark. Panic takes you over.

Should you be afraid of search engines?

Anybody in his right mind should be afraid, very afraid.

About the author:
This is one of a series of articles published by the author, Elaine Currie, BA(Hons) at
http://www.Huntingvenus.com
For honest advice on working from home subscribe to Online Profits newsletter by
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What is the Google Dance?

As with any good web developer, the ability to time the changes Google will update your website and refresh the content for better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is in your favor. Welcome to the world of “Google Dance”. The Google Dance is simply that the predetermination of when the actual update will commence.

What really happens is Google sends out spiders to crawl the Internet, usually done to DNS (Domain Name Servers), upon spidering all of the available tables it begins to go through each individual site and updates the content on to Google.com. Thus if you watch your rank on the Google Toolbar, you can tell when your overall page rank has changed.

Understanding SEO and what is necessary to improve your overall ranking. Webmasters have been looking for ways to increase the odds of guessing when the next spidering would commence. There are various versions and servers that go out and crawl thousands of servers at a time, it takes time to relay and decipher this information back to the web server that Google.com pulls its information from.

Some vendors have created programs that actually go out to the data centers themselves to find out approximately when the last index was kicked off. Depending on the information returned from the trace the exact time and date are pinpointed. Is there really that much of an advantage to doing it this way? It depends, if you have a vital update that you want to optimize your site, you may want to know when the last time Google visited your site for content to keep information fresh and relevant.

There are many data centers that Google uses to spider across the world. Each center has a specific region it covers and all the information is gathered in aggregate and returned back to populate Google.com. With this many data centers the chances for continuous indexing is good, but not guaranteed.

www.sitetube.com

About the author:
Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.
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Yahoo! Sponsored Results Now In Shortened Format

Yahoo! Sponsored Results Shortened

Overture has announced that sponsored results on Yahoo! will be streamlined to make them easier for customers to read. The new ad style is very similar to Google's. We have a copy of Overture's email to all their advertisers, informing them of the change.

Dear Advertiser,

A new look is coming to the Yahoo! search results pages that will translate into more clicks for your listings. Yahoo! will introduce a streamlined design that will make the search results displayed on Yahoo! even easier for consumers to read. Our research has shown that by improving the search experience in this way, advertisers can generally expect to see an increase in clicks, while maintaining their conversion rates.

How this change impacts your listings:

• Yahoo! will display shorter descriptions for Sponsored Search listings
• You don't have to make any changes to your listings; they'll be automatically shortened for you when displayed on Yahoo!
• If you'd like to optimise your listings for Yahoo!,begin your description with one short sentence that includes your keyword and focuses on your most important information in the first 70 characters
• Over time, we will fine tune the exact character count that we believe works best for advertisers and search users

Yahoo! is taking this step to improve the search experience for its users. By continuously focusing on delivering highly relevant search results in a user-friendly format, Yahoo! also gives you the best possible platform for reaching customers interested in what your business provides.

Best Regards,

Overture UK

The new ad format will be very similar to what Google currently hosts, which is why most advertisers are welcoming the change. However, for those advertisers who took the time to meticulously craft descriptions to differentiate their listings, this change will probably mean them having to scrap their hard work and go back to the drawing board. How these changes affect Overture's conversion rates and click through rates will be the ultimate evidence of their effectiveness.

Google changes ad format too

Surprisingly enough, Google has chosen the exact same time to start testing longer ad formats. Which format stays will be determined by consumer reactions to the new ad style. In the meantime, advertisers will have to play and watch!

Other articles to read:

Google + Pay Per Click management agencies killing SEO

Search engine optimisation for London businesses

SEO Weekly

About the Author:
Farhad Divecha
Before founding AccuraCast, Farhad worked for and provided consulting services to a number of large and medium sized enterprises in the UK and USA including 3Com, Proctor & Gamble and Household (HFC, HSBC). He has over 7 years of experience marketing products and services online and offline.
Added: 22 Sep 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/37432.html

Search Engine Optimization History

Webmasters today spend quite some time optimizing their websites for search engines. Books have been written about search engine optimization and some sort of industry has developed to offer search engine optimization services to potential clients. But where did this all start? How did we end up with the SEO world we live in today (from a webmaster standpoint seen)?

A guy named Alan Emtage, a student at the University of McGill, developed the first search engine for the Internet in 1990. This search engine was called "Archie" and was designed to archive documents available on the Internet at that time. About a year later, Gopher, an alternative search engine to Archie, was developed at the University of Minnesota. These two kinda search engines triggered the birth of what we use as search engines today.

In 1993, Matthew Gray developed very first search engine robot - the World Wide Web Wanderer. However, it took until 1994 that search engines as we know them today were born. Lycos, Yahoo! And Galaxy were started and as you probably - two of those are still around today (2005).

In 1994 some companies started experimenting with the concept of search engine optimization. The emphasis was put solely on the submission process at that time. Within 12 months, the first automated submission software packages were released. Of course it did not take long until the concept of spamming search engines was 'invented'. Some webmasters quickly realized that they could swamp and manipulate search results pages by over-submission of their sites. However - the search engines soon fought back and changed things to prevent this from happen.

Soon, search engine optimizers and the search engines started playing some sort of a "cat and mouse" game. Once a way to manipulate a search engine was discovered by the SE-optimizers they took advantage of this. The search engines subsequently revised and enhanced their ranking algorithms to respond to these strategies. It was clear very soon that mainly a small group of webmasters was abusing the search engine algorithms to gain advantage over the competition. Black Hat search engine optimization was born. The unethical way of manipulating search engine resulted in faster responses from search engines. Search engines are trying to keep the search results clean of SPAM to provide the best service to customers.

The search engine industry quickly realized that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as an industry would not go away, and in order to maintain useful indexes, they would need to at least accept the industry. Search engines now partially work with the SEO industry but are still very eager to sort out SPAMMERS that are trying to manipulate the results.

When Google.com started to be the search engine of choice for more than 50_f the Internet users it was highly visible to anyone in the industry that search engine spamming had reached a new dimension. Google.com was so much more important to the success of a website that many webmasters solely concentrated on optimizing their sites for Google only as the payoff was worth the efforts. Again - Black Hat SEO took place, pushing down the honest webmaster and their sites in search results delivered. Google started fighting back. Several major updates to Google's algorithms forced all webmaster to adapt to new strategies. Black Hat SE-optimizers but suddenly saw something different happening. Instead of just being pushed down in the search results their websites were suddenly completely removed from the search index.

And then there was something called the "Google Sandbox" to show up in discussions. Websites either disappeared into the sandbox or new websites never made it into the index and were considered in the Google Sandbox. The sandbox seemed to be the place where Google would 'park' websites either considered SPAMMY or not to be conform with Google's policies (duplicate websites under different domain names, etc.). The Google Sandbox so far has not been confirmed or denied by Google and many webmasters consider it to be myth.

In late 2004 Google announced to have 8 billion pages/sites in the search index. The gap between Google and the next two competitors (MSN and Yahoo!) seemed to grow. However - in 2005 MSN as well as Yahoo! Started fighting back putting life back into the search engine war. MSN and Yahoo seemed to gain ground in delivering better and cleaner results compared to Google. In July of 2005 Yahoo! Announced to have over 20 billion pages/sites in the search index - leaving Google far behind. No one search engine has won the war yet. The three major search engines however are eagerly fighting for market share and one mistake could change the fortune of a search engine. It will be a rocky ride - but worth watching from the sidelines.

About the author:
Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and international book author. Examples of his search engine optimization work can be found at http://www.webhostingresourcekit.com and http://www.highlandsranch.us
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How Do Search Engines Work?

To make easy money online you have to get high targeted traffic to your website. This is acheived by your knowledge of how to be ranking high in the search engines. The basic step is to know how search engines work.

Most searh engines have three parts:

a crawler,

an index,

and a search interface

.Let's look at each part individually to get a better understanding of them. Each part has its own role to play in the process, with all parts working together to make searches possiple.

1.The Crawler:

Also known as a "spider" or "bot", this part of the search engine wanders the web, following links and picking up information for its database. Crawlers do most of their work at times of the day when searh engines are less busy, but they typically visit frequently updated pages more often. This is something to keep in mind when you are working on your pages.

Your site's title and text(your content) are the most important thing to a crawler. The fastest way to raise your site's search engine ranking for specific key words is to implementthem into your title and your content.

2.The index.

Once the crawler has collected all that text, it is then stored and indexed. This allows people searching for key words and phrases to get results relating to what they were searching for - their search results. Most sites will incorporate rating systems such as Google Page Rank or Alexa Rankings in positioning your site. These ratings are used attempt to ensure that sites that are important receive more traffic than unimportant sites. To see this in action, go to a search engine and type in a word. You'll see some text on the page saying something like "results 1-10 of 1,234,000". This means that the search engine's index contains 1,234,000 pages it believes are related to the word you typed. If you wanted to, you could look through all these pages to find the information you're looking for.

In order to understand rating systems more thoroughly consider your own site. When you place links on your site you generally do so to increase your users understanding of the content of your site.

If every site in a particular field links to a particular site, this site is probably very important to that field and should, therefore, be listed highly in the lists of search engine results. This is the basic ideology of Google Page Ranks.

Consider again , a site that receives a great deal of traffic, it probably has some information or service that is very important to its users. Alexa ratings attempt to estimate the amount of traffic that a particular site gets and compare it to the amount of traffic that other sites get. The closer that a site is to the most trafficed site on the internet, the more likely it is to have important content if it is relevant to search query.

3.The Interface.

Search engines provide a public intrface for users who want to find information on the web. They can type the word or phrase they're searching for, and the interface will run an algorithm to find the pages relevant to their search and display them.

These algorithms are an important part of the SEO(Search Engine Optimization) business. You'll notice when the algorithms change, the rankings of your website will change with them. No two search engines have the same algorithms. They all work differently, with their unique features, and they will all respond to your website in their own way.

The most popular search engines today include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Alltheweb, and AskJeeves.

Hassan Sarsour

To learn more visit make easy money online

About the Author:
Hassan Sarsour To learn more visit make easy money online
Article Source: http://www.articles411.com