Webmaster Discussions

Ranking your website highly on one of the “big three” search engines (Google, Yahoo or MSN) is a daunting task let alone ranking your website highly on all three. Three engines, three algorithms, three different sets of rules – and yet there are websites out there that have first page rankings across them all – how do they do it?
While all of the major search engines use different algorithms the end goal of all three is the same: to provide the searcher with the most relevant results available. It is this one common thread that makes it possible for an SEO to rank a website highly across all the major engines. While there are a variety of factors at play and an even wider variation in the weight each of these factors are given – the possible variations that can produce relevant results are limited.
For example, if inbound links are given 0% weight then insignificant sites will ranki highly for high-competition phrases. Many reputable companies such as Microsoft could lose rankings for their own names so links must and will always hold value. On the other hand, if links were to hold 100% weight then sp@mming the search engines would be a simple matter and so there are a limited number of possible variables in between these extremes that this factor can have, no matter which engine we are optimizing for.
That said, there are still three main engines with three distinct algorithms despite common requirements. To clarify how to optimize for all of them it’s easiest to discuss them individually first. Due to the way their algorithms work one is best to expect rankings on MSN first, followed by Yahoo! And finally Google (I am assuming that the phrase is of at least moderate competition). For this reason we will discuss them individually in that order.
SEO for MSN
Proper SEO for MSN requires that a site be structured well with a distinct theme throughout and many inbound links. The advantage an SEO has while optimizing a site for MSN is that MSN tends to pick up and credit new content and inbound links very quickly. That means that with the right tactics in place one can rank a website relatively quickly on this important engine.
While MSN has the lowest number of searches performed on it, ComScore’s report back in July revealed that MSN searchers were also 48% more likely to purchase a product or service online than the average Internet user. A very important statistic for website owners that sell online.
To rank highly on MSN one needs to build a solid sized site (exactly how large will depend on your industry – look at the size of your competitor’s sites for an idea), a relevant theme throughout the site that focuses on your primary keywords and a good number of links. MSN doesn’t (at this time) employ an aging delay on links such as the one employed by both Google and Yahoo! So the effects of the site and inbound links can be picked up very quickly and with good SEO efforts one can rank well within a few months on MSN for competitive phrases.
SEO for Yahoo!
Until recently Yahoo! Acted very much like MSN, now it’s leaning a bit more towards Google. Ranking a website well on Yahoo! Requires a solid-sized site with unique content and a very good number of links.
While PageRank is a Google factor, Yahoo! Does have some type of page value factor at play. Many moons ago Yahoo! Was playing with a PageRank-like calculation called WebRank. They even went so far as to put out a beta toolbar testing it. This indicates that there is a factor at play in the Yahoo! Algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank – they just don’t advertise what a specific page’s value is.
Yahoo! is placing a large amount of emphasis on the age of links though not in the same way that Google is. We will get to Google shortly however to understand what to expect from Yahoo! One must understand that when you get a link to your website it won’t hold it’s full value for a number of months. While the exact number of months in unknown it appears to be around 8 before it hold it’s full weight though it will hold some from day one and this weight will increase as time passes.
To rank well on Yahoo! You much optimize your site similar to what you would do for MSN and you must build a large number of inbound links and have patience as these links age. You will not see a sudden spike 2 weeks after a large link-building campaign, you will likely have to wait 3-4 months to notice any significant effect.
SEO for Google
Virtually every webmaster and website owner is primarily concerned about attaining Google rankings due to the significantly higher number of searchers using it. Provided that you are building your website following the best practices of SEO (i.e. unique content, a sizable amount of content, and a good number of incoming links) then your rankings are sure to follow, however due to their aging delay it will likely take longer than on MSN or Yahoo! Google considers the age of your links, your domain and even the individual page to be a factor and the longer your page has been online the better.
Essentially, ranking a site on Google requires that you take the same actions as for the other two, continue your link building efforts on an ongoing basis to insure that you end up with more-and-more links, and that you update your content and add content on a fairly regular basis (though the addition of a blog for example).
Tying it together
The logical process for a new website or one at the first stages of SEO is to first target MSN. At this point you can focus your attention on continuing to build high-quality, relevant links to and content on your site which will continue to increase your value on Yahoo! And Google.
Analysis will be required to determine exactly what weight you will be giving to different areas. For example, if your onsite factors are optimized for MSN then you know that you will need to make up for this in the offsite factors for Yahoo! And Google. If you figured you would need 100 links to rank on Google then you will now need to up that number to account for the fact that you have optimized your site itself for a different engine.
During the analysis process you will likely want to use a tool to speed up the process of keyword density analysis and competitor link analysis. At Beanstalk we use a tool called Total Optimizer pro though there are others out there (note: I have yet to find one that does what this one does as quickly and easily).
Conclusion
I am hoping that none of you read the title and were expecting to rank on the first page of all three major engines next week. Ranking highly on all three major engines takes time, patience and a good few rounds of tweaking to get the perfect balance of onsite and offsite optimization. Of course, as you can gather, done properly it’s well worth the effort.

See more here: Search Engines Optimizing (SEO) for the Big Three Search Engines

There are many ways to go about getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field to boost your search engine rankings when building your home internet business. Let’s explore some linking strategies, and how to determine and obtain “high quality” links. We’re also going to talk briefly about Google’s PageRank.

First, let’s examine a regular link. It’s a piece of text (or image, but we’re going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that matter are:
1) The address which it links to
2) The text of the link
3) The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let’s analyze this information one by one. First, you’d naturally want the link to link to your blog, but to which page of your blog? To an individual post or to your blog’s home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to accumulate all the links to point to your main page instead of individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Let’s say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link that says “Football helmets” and links to your blog. Doesn’t make much sense, right? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms “technological” or “gadget”, it will greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. Hence, it’s essential to express some thoughts when requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Google’s PageRank. It’s basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it at Google by searching under the term “Google pagerank”. What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google’s robots will visit the website to index it. Of course, the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google’s search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits SEO-wise.

Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different to PageRank 0) because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Google’s robots find your blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of 0 and depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blog’s PageRank will also rise eventually.

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targeted visitors who are interested in your niche to arrive at your blog, enable search engines to find and
index your blog and ultimately rank higher in search engine results. The whole subject of SEO is one that cannot be overlooked when nurturing your home internet business. Invest in yourself and your business NOW to start earning the profits you deserve.

Follow this link: More Off-Page SEO For Your Home Internet Business

The Google News team made an interesting post titled “Psst… secrets of Google News exposed!” at official Google blog. The post explained about various Myths and facts related with Google news. Posted by Andy Golding, Software Engineer at Google, Andy also shared about how Google include and publish (rank) articles in Google news.

Coming directly to Myths and facts explained.

1. Updating article once it’s included in Google news helps in higher rankings.

False, According to Google the current Google news crawler doesn’t revisit the articles. Every article/news in crawled only once so changing or updating the article will not help at all in fact any changes you make will not be shown at Google news website. I hope Google news crawler will soon have the functionality of revisiting the WebPages.

2. Placing image next to article improves the rankings.

False, Google do include images in news results and displays them next to your news item, but it cannot read the images and rankings purely depends upon text accompanied in your news item and not on having images in the news.

3. Articles with images and video are not included.

True, Google crawler cannot read flash, videos, images and other such type of multimedia content. Thus it’s a fact that if you new release or article doesn’t contain any text accompanying images or multimedia content then it will not be included at all in news results.

4. Time is a major factor for inclusion.

False, Google crawlers are frequently looking for content related to current event and top stories. There are lots of factors that Google algorithms take into consideration and choose the best articles from the cluster for ranking. Publishing articles prior, after or in midst of any event don’t improve any chances of rankings at all.

5. Articles with Google adsense ads rank high in Google news.

False, well this is the most disputed topic among webmasters not only for Google news ranking but also for Google organic results also. Google had always denied this fact and according to goolge spokesman, “Using AdSense doesn’t have any impact upon our ability to crawl or rank your articles. We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn’t be very objective!”

6. Creating sitemap helps.

True, sitemaps may not help in achieving top rankings but they do definitely help in other way like meta data for our article, specifying category the news would be appear, specifying which articles should appear in google news etc.

7. Redesign or change in site structure may affect my coverage in news rankings.

True, any drastic change in website design or structure, layout etc may cause problems with crawling of your article and hence overall coverage over google new may be affected.

Read the rest here: Getting Your Articles in Google News – Myths and Facts

Why Flash Websites Are Not SEO-Friendly (Yet)

June 2008. That’s not too long ago on your wall calendar, perhaps, but is a geological age or two in “tech time.” Computers and communications technologies like the Web have changed quite a bit since then, but some things apparently take longer than others, as it was in June 2008 that the Google Webmaster’s blog announced that Googlebot was able to extract links and text content from Flash files. This would make it possible for the company to rank and index all the sites using that popular type of content. Adobe chimed in at the time to say what a win-win situation it was. It sure sounded like the previous problems were solved.

Of course, Google backed off a bit by adding that they would have to phase in the changes, that it would take a little time. The firm promised that the first noticeable improvement would be better snippets, the search result blurbs, coming from Flash-filled sites. Since, in the past, Google could get nothing at all from that content, the snippets would be missing or exhibit the only discoverable text (even if it were tags or version numbers). The fact is, there is now some limited functionality to the Googlebot Flash-reading program, but many observers believe the firm overpromised and underdelivered.

Two years on

Adobe has every incentive to convince people that Flash belongs on their Web sites and is fully indexable by all leading search engines. The explosion of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) means that a lack of indexing functionality renders a growing percentage of sites invisible to the search spiders. Two years on, there is still little data being release by either Google or Adobe on the number of Flash pages being indexed, the depth of the indexing, the effect on search results or any other metric. There appears to be quite a disconnect between the PR and the facts.

About a year after the initial announcement, in summer of 2009, Adobe started sending out assurances to RIA developers (again) that they could keep working the way they were working, and didn’t need to alter or repurpose content to make it searchable. The problem, of course, is that this solves nothing, as many Flash pages have little text, anyway, and are composed of images, video and animation, the details of which will not be displayed in the proposed approach.

The search process would work better if a unique URL were associated with each piece of content. When Flash dynamically loads text during the user interaction, and the URL stays the same, Googlebot could track and remember those actions, at least to a reasonable degree, and remain tied to the original URL. Adobe distributed a Flash player to all the search engines to allow spiders the ability to navigate through an SWF application like a virtual user. When specially tweaked for searching, Flash technology can capture all the paths in the SWF application, much like it ambles through pages in standard Web applications and formats.

Workaround time?

In the meantime, progress has stalled. There are workarounds, though. You can use meta tags on whatever HTML page has the SWF file, but the problem with that is that search engines rank on multiple pages, content, linking, user paths and more. Your page will rank low because, as far as the search bots are concerned, your site is just a single page that links with no one and nothing.

The other workaround is an HTML mirror site, where you take your Flash pages and build separate HTML versions of each, stripped down without a lot of fanfare and hoopla included. You will then use meta tags to embed specific search terms that relate to that page. This allows the spider to crawl the entire content of the site, bringing up your ranking and visibility, and you can then insert HTML code to automatically redirect people who open the HTML ringer page to the Flash version. It also allows you to offer, instead of a bells-and-whistles Flash site, a simpler, faster-loading HTML version for people who have dial-up or low-bandwidth connections.

The impact on SEO

No one wants to have to do a pile of extra work like that if it’s not necessary. The problem is, we don’t really know when the full-on solution will be in place. Flash is still a sore spot for SEO pros, and some would prefer that text always remain HTML (which is text), and that Flash be restricted to non-textual content such as animations, videos, illustrations and the like. Others are hoping that the Holy Grail of Flash searchability will be announced, with evidence that it works, any day now. That day is not here, and it’s hard to predict when it will be. In the meantime, there are workarounds, and there is also patience. Perhaps a combination of these is the best route for the moment.

Follow this link: Why Flash Websites Are Not Seo-Friendly (Yet)

In my last article, I talked about how getting high quality links from authoritative websites in your field can boost your search engine rankings. This time, we’re going to explore further into linking strategies, and how to determine and obtain “high quality” links. We’re also going to talk briefly about Google’s PageRank.

First, let’s examine a regular link. It’s a piece of text (or image, but we’re going for text) that links to your blog, and some of the factors that matter are

1)     The address which it links to

2)     The text of the link

3)     The PageRank of the page on which the link resides

Let’s analyze this information one by one. First, you’d naturally want the link to link to your blog, but to which page of your blog? To an individual post or to your blog’s home page? Since your blog is a constantly updated website, it is always wise to accumulate all the links to point to your main page instead if individual posts because they tend to be very time-sensitive.

The text of the link also affects your rankings for a certain keyword. Let’s say your blog is about technological gadgets and another site has a link that says “Barbie dolls” and links to your blog. Doesn’t make much sense, right? If a lot of links that link to your site contain the terms “technological” or “gadget”, it will greatly boost your rankings for those keywords. Hence, it’s essential to put some thoughts when requesting links from other webmasters as you want them to link to your blog with appropriate keywords.

Now, about Google’s PageRank. It’s basically a scale set by Google to measure the popularity of websites. You can read more about it on google.com/technology. What is interesting is that the higher the PageRank of a certain website, the more frequent Google’s robots will visit the website to index it. Of course, the PageRank of a page will also help it to rank higher in Google’s search engine results. In short, having a high PageRank will bring you many benefits SEO-wise.

Your blog will start with no PageRank (which is different to PageRank 0) because Google has not yet indexed your blog. Once Google’s robots find your blog through links on other sites, your blog will show a PageRank of 0 and depending on the PageRank of the referring page, your blog’s PageRank will also rise eventually.

Getting high-quality links to your blog will help direct targetted visitors who are interested in your niche to your blog, enable search engines to find and index your blog and ultimately rank higher in search engine results

Read more: Let's Talk About Google’S Pagerank And How We Can Improve Our Websites