The Google Webmaster Central Blog has in recent weeks provided some clarity and best practices on a few of the current mainstream SEO issues that many enterprises are struggling with, including the value of friendly URLs and Sitemaps. While friendly URLs are almost inherent to modern Web applications like WordPress blogs, they can be very difficult to implement in complex enterprise Web applications and especially ones that integrate older apps. Sitemaps pose the same challenge. When is it worth converting to friendly URLs or to develop the functionality to create dynamic Sitemaps? (more…)

Google is known for their free services, open APIs and their “don’t be evil” motto. For most part they aren’t evil, but keeping their search algorithm a secret is just plain evil. Microsoft is known as a closed source software giant with a desktop OS monopoly. What makes Google any different when they have a proprietary search algorithm and they have a Web monopoly? Why don’t they open their search algorithm? The reasons are very similar to why Microsoft has kept their code closed and ironically Google too can become victim of the power of social computing and open source. (more…)

You know how Ask.com uses Google AdWords network for ads and how AltaVista uses Yahoo! search results for its search? The relationship between search engines and directories are at best described as chaos in my mind. Search-This has an excellent visual representation of this relationship called the Search Engine Decoder. The site also has a PageRank Decoder which demonstrates how PageRank is passed. Besides these very cool SEO tools, the blog has great content and is worth following.

Webmasters and bloggers are normally quite SEO savvy even if they’re not SEO professionals. However, they often neglect SEO efforts and forget about all the useful Web analytics and keyword research tools that are available and so I thought I’d remind readers about some of them. Web analysis tools are getting better everyday so it is good practice to regularly analyze your Website to identify changes and new trends in search traffic. Here is a list of essential tools that you can use to analyze your Website and traffic and to optimize your site for search engines. (more…)

If you own, manage or are in some way involved in a Web site then chances are that you want to know what kind of demographic you are attracting. Are they male or female, young or old? It’s especially interesting when you’re considering paid keywords to attract users. For instance, you may have been trying to target the hippies from the 60’s using the keyword flower power; meanwhile you are attracting young women in their twenties and early thirties! Microsoft adCenter Labs, the R&D team for paid search at Microsoft, offers surprisingly cool paid search researching tools. Their analysis is based on MSN Search data which represents a significant sample group, even if they’re small compared to Google. Their Demographics Prediction tool returns this interesting and visually pleasing result for flower power: (more…)

A couple of months ago I changed the way that this blog’s browser titles are constructed, by placing the keywords first and the blog name last. I explained it in detail as well as the initial results in a post titled How Do HTML Title Tags Affect SEO?. For about two months I saw a negative change in my page rankings, but suddenly my rankings returned and improved. This chart shows the change over time.

So I am pleased to say that all three keywords traced rank better now. What I also learned in the process is that Google seriously penalizes certain changes to pages and that it can take a few weeks to months for the rankings to return.

WordPress has a very useful more tag (<!--more-->) that publishers can use to split their blog posts so that only the part before the <!--more--> tag is displayed on their blog homepages while the whole posts are displayed on the post/content pages. The purpose of this *teaser* is to encourage interested readers to either click on ads or to continue reading by clicking on the “more” link and get more page views for ad sales. Unfortunately WordPress’ default RSS feed does not obey the <!--more--> tag and only offers Full or Summary syndication. Full syndication is what users want, but publishers are reluctant to do that because their RSS subscribers would get everything in their their RSS readers and they wouldn’t need to click-through or browse to the publisher’s Web site. The Better Feed plugin solves that problem and Da Vinci Planet’s feed looks a whole lot better now

It is said that title tags are one of the most important of the on-page factors for SEO. So I put it to the test. A couple of weeks ago I implemented the SEO Title Tag plugin for Wordpress which updated the HTML titles of my pages to be “more SEO friendly”.

The idea was to give keywords more importance in title tags by placing them first, e.g. a page formerly titled “Da Vinci Planet ›› Blog Archive ›› Essential Portable Apps” is now titled “Essential Portable Apps | Da Vinci Planet“. Google’s search results pages have since updated and are now showing the “SEO friendly” page titles. The results are somewhat surprising! (more…)

Here’s a neat trick to add an RSS feed botton to your Google Toolbar, similar to Firefox’s live bookmarks. In addition you can get your site listed in the Google Toolbar Gallery. Of course you can add any site’s RSS feed to your Toolbar, but you can only submit your own site’s button to the Google Toolbar Gallery. (more…)

While doing research on SEO for WordPress, I discovered a few plugins and tips that I really liked. There are thousands of SEO tips out there and you have to identify which of them are applicable to your site and also practical to implement. Likewise there are many WordPress SEO plugins available, but many are outdated or do not work with all Web sites. For instance, I was surprised at how many SEO professionals pumped tagging and more specifically tag clouds. Tagging and tag clouds could, if implemented correctly, have huge SEO potential. The best WordPress plugin for tagging and tag pages is the Ultimate Tag Warrior. It’s perfect; except it doesn’t really work on IIS because (ideally) it uses permalinks (i.e. uses .htaccess). I would love to use this plugin on IIS so I am working a doing that. (more…)

Google is very secretive about how their page ranking system works and to be fair it is probably very, very complex and best left a secret. The reason is that they are applying artificial intelligence to correctly weigh pages as if humans were ranking them. However, SEO specialists are providing more and more clarity on how to optimize sites. According to this site there are “over 100 SEO factors” that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). He created a very detailed and actionable SEO checklist with alleged positives and negatives for Google page ranking factors.

Webmaster Eyes has a pretty cool SEO tool: You point it at a page and it gives the Google PageRank calculation for each of the links on your page. Try it out:

See it with WebmasterEyes.com Enter url Go

This guy seems to be: Google Operating System. Actually the site is updated frequently with news on Google, many tips and links to some little known Google pages.

Did you know Google has a newsletter? Check it out and sign up for Google Friends.

Did you know that Google’s first name was BackRub

BackRub is a “web crawler” which is designed to traverse the web.

Currently we are developing techniques to improve web search engines. We will make various services available as soon as possible.
Sorry, many services are unavailable due to a local network faliure beyond our control. We are working to fix the problem and hope to be back up soon. 12/4/97

BackRub is written in Java and Python and runs on several Sun Ultras and Intel Pentiums running Linux. The primary database is kept on an Sun Ultra II with 28GB of disk

Google Operating System
BackRub