Google | SEM Reach

Posts Tagged ‘Google’

Searching Related Blogs

Commenting on others’ blogs is a great way to get noticed and gain that extra link back to your blog. That process seems easy enough, but how can you find those blogs? Yes you can use blog directories, but that doesn’t tell you if the blog is updated.

Using Google’s blog search: Google Blogsearch, you are able to search up relevant and updated articles in relation to your category. It gives you a great list of blogs which have related posts and posts which have been updated within the hour, day, week or month.

This is a great way to target your search, as well as use searches from around the world. Changing the extension of the domain to a preferred country will get you that country’s blog search and get you targeted results, which will make a large difference in your rankings.

Getting a link on every updated blog will ensure spiders come and index that page thus your link. Getting more and more links on updated blogs will help your blog’s rankings, whether it be for searches, PageRank, or even on the blog search itself.

Posted by Admin on June 1st, 2010

Benefits of Sitemaps

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Websites are constantly updating. This means the website is growing. Growing with new pages. New pages of updated content. This is how you rank well with updated content, content rich for Google to index. But one problem, how are you going to get Google to come to your site, and even then, how will they index your links? Going through each page is a time consuming thing for a crawler, especially with thousands of new pages appearing on the net each day. Sitemaps is your answer.

Google crawlers, and other search engines, may or may not index a certain page. It is not uncommon for a crawler to miss a page, even if its an important page of you website. Sitemaps are like a wake up call to Google. They let Google know about pages which they may not have discovered. An XML Sitemap, or just Sitemap, is “a list of the pages on your website”. Through the normal crawling process, if your site has constant updates of pages, it may not see it, so a Sitemap will contain links of your website in order for crawlers to easily index.

The XML file lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (last update, relevance, importance and how often it changes). Sitemaps clear things up for crawlers. It makes life so much easier for them, and does benefit you. You get more pages on the Internet, something which is vital for any succeeding website.

Sitemaps generally are used for websites that have dynamic content, such as forums, directories and search engines (Youtube for example). Some pages may not seem important to Google, and so they will miss it, and so you need to get it to index that page. Some sites such as blogs do extend to 50-100 pages long and may not be well interlinked. There is every chance that Google will miss on of them and so they will need a boost, ie. a Sitemap. On the other side of the spectrum, newer websites may not be noticed by Google, and so a submission of your Sitemap to search engines may give your site an extra boost.

Here are a few quick submission links:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=[sitemap-url-goes-here]
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=[sitemap-url-goes-here] http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=[sitemap-url-goes-here]
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[sitemap-url-goes-here]

For example, SEM Reach’s Sitemap is http://www.semreach.com/sitemap.xml, so I would replace [sitemap-url-goes-here] with the Sitemap URL giving:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.semreach.com/sitemap.xml

You can read extensively through Google’s help article: Creating and submitting Sitemaps.

Posted by Admin on May 14th, 2010

Importance of Google

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The top 4 search engines, as I know of, are Google, Yahoo! Search, Bing (MSN) and Ask. Together, they make up about 98% of total searches. This is a fairly significant figure as you should look at the portion of each search engine mentioned in comparison to the total amount of searches when added together.

Analysis
After further analysis, Google holds 71% of the search engine market, Yahoo! holds 15%, Bing holds 9% and Ask holds 3%, with some inaccuracies. During the year of 2006, the difference between Google and Yahoo! was about 38%, today it is around 57%. During June 2009, Google saw an all time high of holding 74% of the market share, and has steadily sat at around 71%. This is an overwhelming figure and should be taken seriously.

So what does this all mean?
As you can see, Google doesn’t just have the edge, Google has a major slice out of worldwide searches. This means you must focus on Google, without hesitation. Google, holding 71% of the search engine market means that 71% of the world could potentially visit your site. Focusing on that portion could potentially be a new member on your forum, or a new reader of your blog, a new advertiser or a new sponsor. Any business owner to blogger wants this share and targeting your efforts at one search engine is better than sharing your efforts at search engines that may not help in the long run.

The other 29% of the market is good to look at, but you should never focus solely on them. You won’t get the required traffic that you could potentially get. Luckily for everyone, Google is easy going in optimizing your site, if you know how to. Simple off and on page optimizing will help get your site up there and help you in the long run. SEM Reach has provided many tips so far, and proof that we have been ranking well, and we have applied the techniques mentioned to gain a higher rank.

Side Note
You should note that Yahoo! and Microsoft will merge into one marketing company, however run under 2 sites. This basically means Bing will display the same results as Yahoo. This essentially means there is no Yahoo any more and Bing’s searches will take over as the number 2 search engine when everything is finalized. Also, AOL Search displays results according to Google, and therefore it is just a subset of Google, and not a real search engine in its own rights. With only 3 major search engines to be focusing on, you should really see which one will help you get noticed.

Statistics Source

Posted by Admin on May 4th, 2010

Link Optimization

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This is a little sequel to the image optimization article. Optimizing links are really easy and will make a difference in the long run.

To optimize your link, you should set it out as follows:

<a href=”URL” title=”Hover Text”>Anchor Text</a>

Explanation

URL: Basically the site’s domain you are linking to.
Hover Text: Text which when you mouseover the link, will display a short message stating the purpose of the site.
Anchor Text: Text which you want Google to see your site as. This is important for SERP ranking and keywords.

Example:

<a href=”http://www.semreach.com” title=”Search Engine Marketing Blog”>Search Engine Marketing</a>

Result

Search Engine Marketing

Note how I used “Search Engine Marketing” instead of the site’s name, SEM Reach. I want when people to search “Search Engine Marketing” to see SEM Reach and optimizing links to show that Search Engine Marketing = SEM Reach will be beneficial, and when thousands of people link so, you will be thoroughly rewarded.

Target

If you want to link to another site, its best to add target="_blank" between the URL and Title. This means it will open in a new tab or window. You want users to stay of your site the longest, and so linking to another site, but having it open up/closing your site, will mean people will stay on another and possibly forget yours.

Forums

One other thing which should be considered. On forums, sometimes they do not allow title text for links. For images, they don’t let alternative text. What can you do now? Its best to first add the optimized link (with anchor text) before any image links. This is due to the weighting of un-optimized links vs. un-optimized images.

Posted by Admin on April 30th, 2010

Image Optimization

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After a few quick Google searches for the term “image optimization”, I noticed that the top 5 sites didn’t even have relevant “image optimization” information for SEO. I wondered how people new to “image optimization” would cope (and frankly, I though Google was there to make lives a tad more easier) and so here is how you should do it:

<img src="Website URL" border="Image Border width in Pixels" alt="Alternative Text" width="Image Width in Pixels" height="Image Height in Pixels" />

Explanation

Website URL: Simple your domain, ie. http://www.semreach.com (Be sure to include the http://)
Image Border width in Pixels: Border going the whole way around the image, ie. 0 for no border, 1 for a thing border and so on.
Alternative Text: Some people may use text browsers, or disable images, so in replacement, some text should be used to distinguish image from image. This usually includes one or two keywords for optimization along with a descriptive word, ie. SEM Reach Logo
Image Width in Pixels: What is the width of the image?
Image Height in Pixels: What is the height of the image?

As a whole, this is one example of an optimized image:

<img src="http://www.semreach.com/images/affiliate.png" border="0" alt="Search Engine Marketing" width="88" height="31" />

Result:

Posted by Admin on April 29th, 2010

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