Musings and things that amuse us

Sites that use embedded video are finding that oftentimes the page is not appearing in search results, even though it is getting a lot of traffic from users that know about it.

Mark Yoshitake, YouTube and Google Partnerships, and Erick Hachenburg, Metacafe at the Searchnomics 2007 conference suggest:

• Upload content to YouTube, then re-embed using YouTube embeds
• Write a description that feeds curiosity
• Ensure you tag with accurate tags and tag lots
• Use memorable and descriptive titles
• Don’t mislead
• Get to know the industry standard Media RSS

More from Searchnomics 2007, Shashi Thakur, Member of Technical Staff, Google Inc., and Paul O’Brien, Marketing Director for Zvents discuss the things you should, and the things you should not worry about when it comes to search engine friendly design.

Stuff to worry about

• Include unique, useful content, preferably HTML
• Include relevant and organic links
• Think accessibility – it needs to be easy to reach with a text based browser
• Use alt tags
• Take care with images, flash, frames, JavaScript
• Think aesthetics
• Make your pages “ bite size”
• Check page rendering in different browsers
• Don’t include too many advertisements
• Good Titles are extremely important
• Pages need to be easily reachable
• Don’t bury the good stuff deep within the sites

Stuff you shouldn’t worry about (stuff that does not affect ranking)

• Type of server (Apache vs. IIS)
• File types: HTML, PHP, ASP, CFM
• AdWords and AdSense

Links: The Good and the Bad

• Encourage related sites to link to you by writing unique content
• Avoid reciprocal links for the sake of a link
• Avoid any type of link that you have to pay for
• Avoid link exchanges (you know the sites, you give me a link, I’ll give you one back)
• Avoid bad neighborhoods, that is, the shady areas of the Web

Ugly Links vs. Pretty Links

Ugly links are long and keyword less

Good looking links are short and keyword rich

Both of these sites talk about Independence day, which do you think makes more sense to search?

http://free.ed.gov/subjects.cfm?subject_id=257

http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Independence_Day.shtml

Paul O’Brien suggests by tidying up your URL’s, you can increase your ranking in search results; he suggests getting to know Mod Rewrite.

Anchor text

When using anchor text (the text within your site that links to another page), make sure you use choose your words wisely.  Give some meaning to the words, so when search engine bots look at them, it makes some sense:

Awful Anchor Text:

Using the word “here” as the anchor text in this sentence:

“You can read more about Searchnomics 2007 here”

Great Anchor Text

Using the words “Searchnomics 2007” as the anchor text in this sentence:

“Read more about Searchnomics 2007″

Related content on BlogWell that may interest you:

     See your site through different browsers

     Why does my site not appear in Google

     Tools for Search Engine Marketing

A common question, with a simple answer:

Google can only crawl and index Web sites that the Googlebot can see.

The very next question is: How do I know whether the Googlebot can see my site?

From Google’s Webmaster Guidelines*, pay particular attention to the first technical recommendation:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Lynx is licensed as open source, which means that it is free.  You can either download Lynx v2.8.5, or if you don’t want the hassle of downloading and installing it, just use a Lynx viewer; you type in your URL and voila – it shows you what the Googlebot can see.

If you are a little more techie and want Lynx on your machine, Tech Republic have written a cheat sheet that includes 20 of the most useful Lynx keyboard shortcuts.

* Site owners: Don’t be put off by the title “Google Webmaster Guidelines” as they are not just for webmasters, they are for Web site owners too, and they are written in simple English.

If you have a site, whether you are in charge of it or contracting it out, you need to make sure it adheres to the basic guidelines; if it doesn’t, your site can be penalized by Google and the other search engines.  And, reading the guidelines is a lot simpler (and smarter) than trying to get your site back into Google once it has been penalized.

Related Stories:

Know what search engines hate and avoid the Google Death Penalty

What does the Googlebot see when it visits your site?

See your site through different browsers

If you want a successful blog, you need traffic. If you want traffic you need to understand how search engines relate to you as well as your competitors.

Although many of these sites require that you have your own URL, e.g. blogwell.com instead of blogwell.wordpress.com, all of them offer lots of other useful information. Best of all – they are free.

Read more »

I was recently given the opportunity to speak with Adam Lasnik, Google’s Search Evangelist about search engine optimization, and it started me thinking about title elements and meta description tags; specifically, just how important is it to get the words right?

When you search on Google, the two most obvious things that come back are the title of a Web page, and a brief description of it. Most people will easily recognize a result from a search query.

Read more »