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.

Indexed is a site where the owner, Jessica Hagy, sketches diagrams of arbitrary ideas onto index cards to “make fun of some things and sense of others”. Great sense of humor!

It’s interesting from an SEO perspective because the site does not have much indexable content, but it has original content in the form of images. It’s the originality through creativity and simplicity that attracts users and that is more valuable than SEO.

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…)

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.

With all the fuss around Google and how cool they are, it seems few people are paying attention to Microsoft’s answer: Windows Live. Windows Live has a matching solution for almost every one of Google’s services. If you spend a little time looking at it, it’s actually very impressive and makes you really wonder how things will shape up. The interface is clean and sophisticated and it supports Firefox and Opera.

What is Windows Live?

Your online world gets better when everything works simply and effortlessly together. That’s the basic idea behind Windows Live. So the things you care about—your friends, the latest information, your e-mails, powerful search, your PC files, everything—come together in one place. This is a brand new Internet experience designed to put you in control. And this is just the beginning—you’ll see many more new services in the coming months.

Here is a list of some of the services that Windows Live is offering (all still in beta).

live.com
The main site which is basically a search portal and allows customization similar to Google’s personalization.

Windows Live Ideas
Lists most of the initiatives they are working on.

Windows Live Local
Microsoft’s answer to Google Maps. They have a “Road”, “Aerial” and “Bird’s eye” view. Search Engine Guide has an article comparing the services and they prefer Live Local.

Windows Live Favorites
Save your favorites on-line. You can synch your Live Favorites with your IE Favorites and you can share them on-line. Doesn’t seem to try and be a del.icio.us.

Microsoft Office Live
The name implies that it’s an on-line version of MS Office, but it really seems to be more about creating and hosting Web sites. With the basic service you can register a domain name (new domain), create and host the Web site, get 5 email accounts and traffic reports for FREE! Not bad You are required to give your credit card information, but you don’t get charged.

Microsoft Gadgets
Gadgets for Windows Sidebar will run on your desktop or dock into Windows Sidebar, an upcoming feature in Windows Vista alongside other applications. Gadgets for Start.com (a.k.a. Web or Server-based Gadgets) provide a fast, customizable homepage with a clean user interface.
You may, as I have, also wonder what start.com is and what the relation is to live.com. sanaz’s space has a good description, but basically start.com is a testing area for live.com and ideas are tested there first before being implemented on live.com.

live.com blog
A blog maintained by the live.com development team where you can get the latest info on updates.

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: