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Search Engines (SE) Will Always Try to Return
Something
Search engines can not return nothing. By virtue of
their business model, they have to return valid
results. Often refered to as Search Engine Results
Page (SERP). If users don't find what they are looking
for they will change their query, or in frustration go
to a different search engine. What this means is
Search Engines not only have a moral imperative but a
business survival impetus to provide valid results.
What is the Algorithm?
Note that SEs use the term index when
discussing their ranking algorithm. Recall the index
card system when you were doing your research in the
library? The same construct is used to index webpages
and determine relevance. Was the book name relevant
(title tag)? Was the synopsis what you were looking
for (meta description)? Were the keywords relevant
(meta keywords)? Did the chapters cover the
information you were searching (h1 to h5 tags)? Did
the content of the book have the keywords?
You are the Librarian
Back then, it was the librarian's job to provide
the index information and make sure it was accurate.
Today SEs look at your pages much the same way a
librarian does. You are your website's librarian for
the search engines. Provide the proper information so
your pages can be indexed precisely. Don't use
deceptive tags, be accurate. Don't use keywords in
meta tags that don't exist in your page. Don't stuff
keywords in your tags and content.
Good Content Always Wins
Today, it is your job to provide value when
constructing your web pages. Valuable content will
always rank well. Don't write exclusively for the SEs,
write for your viewers. By giving them value, your
pages will rank well and will weather any storm.
What can I do?
Know your company, know your market, know your
competition, know your product or service and most
importantly, know yourself. Provide value to your
viewers. Write content that is informative and
interesting. Give your viewers a compelling reason to
drill into your site.
Don't practice black arts when optimizing your site.
This will eventually come back to bite you. In this
day and age where businesses live or die based on
SERPs, creating a value oriented website is the best
insurance for longevity.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Industry News
General Information
Wikipedia Information:
Google
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Microsoft |
Ask
Jeeves
Search Engine Stock Quotes
CUSTOM SOLUTIONS FOR:
Small Business
Government
Large Organizations
SEO's and Webmasters
Educational Institutes
Current Clients
Pay Per Click vs Non-Pay
Don't you wish it was easy to achieve a first-page search engine ranking in Google?
What is “organic” Search Engine Optimization?It is the process of making Website changes in order to ranking higher in the non-paid listings of search engine keyword search results.
Achieving a high rank naturally can save you money in search engine Paid Placement advertising.
Current News (RSS Feeds)
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Search Engine Watch |
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Google Launches Google Finance At long last,
Google has launched its own Google Finance
service. For years, those seeking specialty
financial information via Google have been sent
to competitors such as Yahoo and MSN. Now
Google's providing financial information
directly to its own users.
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Highlights from the SEW Blog: Mar. 20, 2006 Featured
posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well
as our customary search headlines from around
the web.
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Search Engine Forums Spotlight Links to the
week's topics from search engine forums across
the web: Google Considers European Retail Push -
Using Link Farms as a Weapon? - What Do You Love
& Hate About Google - How I Made a Million in 3
Months - What Is A 'Poison Keyword?' - Is a
Site's Age a Factor? and more.
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Highlights from the SEW Blog: Mar. 16, 2006 Featured
posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well
as our customary search headlines from around
the web.
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Finding the Values of U.S. Homes Talking
about the 'real estate bubble' is a popular
parlor game these days. Now you can find your
own estimates for how over-or-under valued your
neighborhood is thanks to a new web site called
Zillow.
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Winning a Search Advertising Bid War Your
pay-per-click campaign is advancing steadily
until suddenly, the ranking officer at some
joker's company launches a surprise attack,
overruns your position, and pins you down in a
bloody bidding war. What do you do? Pull back?
Hunker down? Or counter-attack?
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Highlights from the SEW Blog: Mar. 13, 2006 Featured
posts from the Search Engine Watch blog, as well
as our customary search headlines from around
the web.
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Search Engine Forums Spotlight Links to the
week's topics from search engine forums across
the web: Microsoft's Windows Live Search Opens;
Bye-Bye MSN Search? - Demographics Added to
AdWords - It's Illegal And Unethical And They
Know It! - Click Fraud Issue Growing - MSN
AdCenter Primer for New Users, and more.
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The Search Engine Report - Number 112 Search
Engine Watch editor Danny Sullivan recaps top
search engine stories from February 2006.
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Search Engine Optimization for Podcasts Podcasting
is comparatively new, though there are already
numerous podcast search engines and it's
important to optimize your audio files if you
want listeners to find your spoken content.
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SEOmoz.org |
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Exalead's Advanced Query Operators Via Gary
Price - Exalead, a major competitior in the 2nd
tier search engines, has an incredible array of
advanced operators to help sophisticated users
refine queries. The offerings include: An
advanced search page with the ability to modify
virtually every aspect of keywords on/off page A
set of advanced operators to narrow your search
Another set that can widen your search A ...
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Calculating Relevancy of a Search Result The
poor results for SEO got me thinking about the
ways in which engineers would measure the
quality and relevance of the search results for
a query. I came up with a few quick ideas, but
I'd love to hear feedback and ideas. Perhaps a
small article/project can bubble up from this
brew. Psychology of Searcher Informational vs.
Transactional query (looking to research or buy)
Navigational vs. Search query (going to a
specific place or browsing for the right place)
Broad scope vs. Narrow scope (researching a
category or searching for an exact item)
Open-Ended vs. Specific-Minded (Is open to
receiving multiple viewpoints or ...
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Domain Searches Using the Overture KW Tool Lots
of people use the Overture Keyword Tool to
estimate search volumes and get ideas for
additional keywords to target. I went there
over the weekend to do a few domain searches. I
felt that it would be a good way to measure
"brand strength" or get some idea of the number
of type-ins a domain might be getting.Some of
the results that I found were staggering, others
sobering, and some were rather funny. I typed
in the URLs for most of my sites and only one of
them had a meaningful count - about 500. ...
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SEOmoz's News Bend I've been getting a lot
of feedback about SEOmoz's blog shying away from
many of the most mainstream and oft-discussed
topics in the field. Everything from who's
sueing Google to stock earnings to acquisitions
and bannings gets written about at sites like
SERoundtable, Threadwatch & SEW, but Rand never
mentions it... why? The answer is that I don't
think it's worth providing additional coverage
of those topics. If they relate to something
we're writing about or we can add a completely
new angle, that's great, but in general posts
like the on I made...
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A Morning Stroll through Hypertext Town Over
at Debra's Linkspiel blog, guest writer Bill
Slawski is talking about offline advertising for
online services. This was my favorite bit:
Walking through a parking lot, I feel an urge to
click on cars, noticing that some Maryland and
Pennsylvania license plates include URLs instead
of state mottos. Kind of hard to mouse over
vehicles while they are barreling down the
highway, but it must help spread the word that
these states have websites. As online push
marketing becomes more and more expensive, gu...
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China Search Marketing Tour in Shanghai &
Nanjing More from David Temple on the China
Search Marketing Tour: The China Search
Marketing Tour left Beijing and headed to
Shanghai. All the tour members liked the "vibe"
in Shanghai, a very modern city. Shopping was
the first priority and everyone headed down to
Nanjing Road, a famous shopping area of
Shanghai. Our bargaining skills came into play
and there were good deals to be had. We had
lunch at a Japanese restaurant, Ajisen Ramen,
(of all places) but the food was good and the
price was right. That evening we attended a
fantastic acrobatic show. Women spinning plates,
men juggling, feats of strength, etc. The show
cul...
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Dancing on the dark side Rand didn't just
ask his viewing public to vote 'yea' or 'nay' on
black hat topics, he asked the SEOMoz team as
well. Since I still hope to be an elf when I
grow up, I gave Rand my usual elven advice:
don't do it -- unless you want people to talk
about you.Black hat is another of those SEO buzz
expressions that gets done to death, but right
now it's still cool to talk about hats and hat
colors. Personally, I think everyone should be
classified a grey hat.In time, we'll probably
use Black Hat to mean something entirely
different from "violating search engine
guidelines". No expression keeps its original
meaning for long.&nb...
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Top Results for SEO Over the 3 years or so
that I've been watching the ranking websites for
the term "SEO" at Google, there have been some
massive changes. From the dropouts of big sites
like SEOInc and SEO-Guy, to the incredibly quick
climb of MattCutts (now ranking #4 at my DC),
the SEO SERPs have been anything but static.
While Matt's been rising, Aaron's SEOBook has
fallen a few spots, and the stock quote for "STORA
ENSO OYJ" still appears at the top (only at G...
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Wikipedia Link Building Suggestion For
anyone who uses Wikipedia's lax security to add
links, let me make a suggestion - add your link
in the "discussion" section for the page
(example) and ask others to review whether the
link you're providing will be pertinent or not.
This way, you get a real, non-nofollow,
indexable link from Wikipedia and you are at a
much lower risk of pissing off the community of
editors. Granted, Wikipedia's fact pages do
provide some nice click-through traffic, and the
value of being on the actual page, both for
visitors and search engines is greater, but I
think if you have doubts about the validity of
the...
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Yahoo! Search blog |
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B-Ball Madness, Web Video Style? These guys
are hungry, that?s why we watch them. No
contract disputes, no ego tirades ? at least not
yet ? just pure college basketball and lots of
it. Starting this week, we?re pulling together
as much NCAA tournament coverage...
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Know Any Good Engineers or Operations Managers? One
of the benefits of del.icio.us now being part of
Yahoo is that we can afford to hire more people
to give the service the attention it needs to
grow bigger, faster, and better. In fact, we're
looking to beef...
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A Chat with Andrei Broder (Part III) A while
back, Andrei Broder, a Yahoo! Research Fellow
and Vice President of Emerging Search
Technology, spent an afternoon telling us a bit
about his decades-long history within the search
industry and talking about his future projects.
To wrap up...
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Achtung Maybe: Report from the ETech Attention
Zone O'Reilly's fifth Emerging Technology
Conference wrapped up in San Diego on Thursday.
The weather was unsettled and unseasonably cool,
but it never put a chill on the flow of big
ideas or diminished the quality of conversation
in the...
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A chat with Andrei Broder (Part II) Last
week, we published the first of a three-part
interview with Andrei Broder, Yahoo! Research
Fellow and VP of emerging search technology for
Yahoo! In today?s segment, we spend some time
chatting with Andrei about what he means by
?search...
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Making Money with Shopping APIs, and More Yahoo!
is now accepting applications for a commercial
version of our Shopping APIs featuring product
search, price comparison, ratings & reviews, and
shopping browse. The program, which is now in
limited beta, is similar to an affiliate model
in that...
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Searching out the video buzz on Hollywood?s
biggest night Here at Yahoo!, we work on
bringing you lots of ways to tap the web for
whatever interests you ? movies, music, games,
etc ? both on Yahoo and from across the web.
This weekend, we?re featuring news, images,
video...
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"Search without a box" - A chat with Andrei
Broder (Part 1) A while back, we spent an
hour interviewing a new colleague of ours,
Andrei Broder. Andrei joins our talented team
here at Yahoo!, in the role of Yahoo! Research
Fellow and Vice President of Emerging Search
Technology. Andrei's decades-long career...
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Going deeper into the Wikipedia We've been a
big fan of Wikipedia for a while now, and we've
been working together with the Wikimedia folks
to make the Wikipedia even more accessible and
easy to use. Now, as part of our larger effort
to get...
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What's been going on with Yahoo! Answers? It?s
hard for us on the core product team to believe
that it?s only been 2 months since we launched
the beta of Yahoo! Answers. Since then, we've
added many features to the site in a steady
stream of improvements....
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Sniffing out the Best in Show on Yahoo! Video
Search Some may argue that the ?mockumentary?
Best in Show did little to portray competitive
dog showing in a positive light, but it can also
be argued that the movie did a great deal to
help bring the sport to mainstream...
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Yahoo! Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox, reloaded Firefox
and Yahoo! fans take note. Mozilla.org released
Firefox 1.5 last November and is gaining
converts faster than ever. The Yahoo! Firefox
Toolbar 1.0 worked well with Firefox 1.5, and
since that release launched, we?ve been working
hard to fix...
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My Web 2.0 Update We wanted to give you a
quick update on what we?ve been up to with My
Web. Not everything around here happens with
thunderous fanfare, though we have been known to
jump up and down when the occasion calls. :-)...
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Super Bowl XL ? that?s 40, not extra large,
tough guy Ah, Super Bowl. For some, it?s a
time-honored tradition, for others, just an
opportunity to brush up on Roman numerals. This
annual gridiron classic, now four decades deep,
certainly attracts a diverse crowd of sports
fans and not-so-sports fans who...
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Search in the Future Over on the Unofficial
Yahoo Weblog, Joe poses a thought provoking
question: Is search really the future for Yahoo!
(or anyone else for that matter)? You bet it is.
As we've said in the past, search is one of
Yahoo's...
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The
Ask.com Blog |
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Happy St. Patrick's Day Today's the day to
celebrate the Irish. Remember to wear some green
and join in the festivities. We have. Quick
Links:* Holiday History * St. Patrick's
Biography * All About Ireland...
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Welcome Ask.com Italia! I'm excited to
announce that now Italians too can enjoy Ask's
advanced search technology. Our new Ask.com
Italia was officially launched in beta on March
8. Italian users may have caught a glimpse of
Ask.com and its remarkable technology...
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Benvenuto Ask.com Italia! Vi annuncio con
immenso piacere che ora anche gli Italiani
potranno approfittare della tecnologia di
ricerca avanzata Ask. Il nuovo Ask.com Italia 蠳tato
lanciato ufficialmente in versione beta l'8
marzo. Probabilmente gli utenti italiani avranno
giࠡvuto modo...
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Ask.com France: A Fresh Alternative The
French community has been waiting a long time
for a newcomer in the search engine arena. The
wait is over! At the same time as Ask.com is
unveiling a new image for its American, British,
Japanese, Spanish and...
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Ask.com France: une alternative fraeur
Cela fait longtemps que la communaut頦ran硩se
attend l’arriv饠d’un nouveau venu sur la sc讥 des
moteurs de recherche. Voil࠱ui est fait ! Ask.com
a profit頤u d鶯ilement de la nouvelle image de ses
sites am鲩cain, anglais, japonais,...
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Inside Ask Maps The new Maps product we
launched last week has had a fantastic response
from our users, the press, and the blogosphere .
This has turned out to be both a good and bad
thing for Maps. We are getting...
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Code Red Party Recap As many of you know,
yesterday was kind of a big day for us. We
finally unveiled the new Ask.com and Barry
Diller got a chance to articulate why our search
engine is a relevant part of the search world...
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The New Ask.com Blasts Off It's...alive!!!
On Sunday night at around 8:15pm PST we
officially launched the new Ask.com into orbit.
As usual with these things, it's not without
some bugs here and there, so we'll get right on
those. But she's up there and...
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Another Brand Retirement of Note: Teoma
With all of the focus on our flagship brand
changing, we wanted to point out another brand
shift we'll be making soon: we are rolling the
Teoma brand in to Ask, pointing the Teoma.com
domain to http://search.ask.com. As we've...
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Live from New York, It’s…. Special Thanks
to the WebmasterRadio.FM folks who have offered
to webcast and podcast Barry Diller’s SES
keynote address Monday. The opening keynote will
be broadcast live in a special edition of The
Daily Search Cast with SES Chair Danny
Sullivan...
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Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO |
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I like the search in Google Finance (Just a
quick note. I’ve been trying to get to bed by
midnight each night.) Here’s the thing. I don’t
check our stock price that often. When I do,
it’s mostly to assure myself that I can still
afford plenty of cat food and/or cat toys to
keep our cat in the style to which she [...]
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Fortune Cookie Sometimes I forget I’m a
geek. Then I get a fortune cookie like There
will always be delightful mysteries in your
life. Lucky numbers: 10 22 25 19 31 41 and I
immediately notice “Hmm. Those numbers could
form an IP address of 102.225.193.141. Should I
ping it?” By the way, the best fortune cookie I
ever got? It was [...]
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Googlebot: Keep out! Okay, that last post
was pretty earnest, so I feel the need to post
something really technical now. At SES New York,
someone asked “Why don’t you provide a
parameter, like ‘?googlebot=nocrawl’ to say
‘Googlebot, don’t index this page’?” That was a
pretty good question. The short answer would be
that on pages you don’t want [...]
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Google++ If you’re not a Googler, please
ignore this post. Okay, it’s just us Googlers
now, right? I’m sure you’ve seen Danny
Sullivan’s post about 25 things he loves about
Google and 25 things he hates about Google. If
your service got a shout-out on the love list,
congratulations. There’s a ton of stuff that
Google is [...]
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SEO Advice: clean house before press releases
(Just a quickie post) A quick tip related to
checking your own site: if you’re going to send
out a press release about your SEO company, make
sure your site is clean before you do the press
release. Site in Internet Explorer: Site after
pressing the <ctrl>-A key: We often read press
releases too. If you’re going to attract [...]
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SEO Advice: check your own site Remember a
while ago when I said that you should check your
website for spam before doing a reinclusion
request? In general, any time you think Google
may be dropping your site, it’s a good idea to
check for spam on your own site. For example, a
site called “The People’s Cube” recently posted
an [...]
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Review: ShuttlePRO Multimedia Controller
Short review: It just works. I love it. Highly
recommended if you’re looking for a flexible USB
input device. It looks like this: Longer review:
I was in an Apple store with a friend this
weekend who was buying a video iPod, and I saw
the ShuttlePRO2 from Contour Design and bought
it on an impulse. [...]
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Send. More. Spam reports. I’m looking for
some more spam reports. Not in the comments on
my blog; please use Google’s spam report form.
I’m especially looking for
Chinese/Japanese/Korean spam. Oh, and any sites
that consist mostly of English keyword stuffing
would be nice too. No special keywords are
needed, but feel free to put “cjk” on any
Chinese/Japanese/Korean [...]
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How to sign up for WebmasterWorld
WebmasterWorld (also referred to as WMW) is one
of the earliest forums to talk about search
engine optimization (SEO) and site owner issues.
Back in 2001 or so, there were 3-4 main public
SEO forums, including WMW, JimWorld (now found
at searchengineforums.com), and Doug Heil’s
forum. Each of those sites continues to discuss
exciting SEO-related [...]
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Back to Work Okay, a good night’s sleep
helps cure the crankiness, so it’s back to work.
No Etech, no Cebit, no SXSW, no GDC for me. No
SES in China (though that would be fun), no
AD:TECH. Just a nice month or two of solid work,
I hope. Time to get back into the swing [...]
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Search Engine Share - US/Canada
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