SEO Advice

If you are looking to start a new site, you may want to investigate purchasing a used domain that already has an existing web site on it. If the web site and domain is more than a year old, you can avoid the dreaded google sandbox and most likely rank quicker for your targeted keyphrases. One large company that sells used domains is sedo.com but there are numerous others as well.

This might not be a startling revelation of any kind, but just revalidates how critical being part of trusted neighborhoods and having strong linking from established, related sites. You can tell how well Google trusts the content of your web site by how deep Google will spider and index your web site.

Check your web logs and see what Googlebot is doing. Is it spidering deep within your site? Does a site:www.yourdomain.com query on Google display only your home page? If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that there is a low trustiness factor from Google and it just doesn’t think your site is very important.

If your site is new, then you probably know why this is happening. Go and get some backlinks to your site. If your site is established, then you probably have a problem some where. Maybe you are involved in some bad neighborhoods that Google has little respect for. Dump your reciprocal link programs, get some good content and start getting legitimate links to your web site. Easier said than done, but this is the foolproof solution.

This tip helps usability for humans and search engine spiders alike: make sure that every web page is no more than 2 clicks deep in your web site. By that I mean, a web page should never be more than two clicks away from every other web page on your web site. This is usually the case for most web sites because they will have a consistent footer with main links and one of those links will be to the site map which has a link to every single page.

One search engine optimization step for web sites that is often overlooked is to use keywords as your anchor text when linking to other pages in your web site. Anchor text are the words are actually linked and you click on when following a link.

For instance, lets say your web site focuses on mortgages. Instead of linking to your home page with the standard “Home” as your anchor text, use “Mortgages” instead. For this tip, its nice to have a text link based footer with no graphics which is usually below the fold and designed more for search engine spiders and not human visitors.

Yahoo announced late last week that they were releasing Yahoo Maps from beta. I assume this means that they have ironed out any and all bugs associated with the service and that it is running smoothly. For those not in know, here are some of the features that Yahoo maps touts:

• Multi-point routing, (from A to B to C)
• A new mini-map which gives you an overview of what you’re looking at
• Satellite and Aerial imagery, wall to wall in the USA, and for over 100 cities internationally
• Full integration with Yahoo! Local, including search and SmartView
• Saved locations and auto-complete against your saved locations, recent locations and Yahoo! Address Book
• The ability to return to the old-style Yahoo! Maps for when you’re on a Dial-Up connection
• Quick access to maps from within Yahoo! Mail using Yahoo! Shortcuts

Yahoo and MSN are now officially supporting the Sitemap XML protocol joining Google who originally released the protocol under the Alike Creative Commons License in hopes that other search engines would adopt it. Sitemaps is a free and easy way for webmasters and site owners to inform search engines about every URL in their web site and which ones they want crawled or spidered.

MSN Live Search appears to be improving its algorithms to be less susceptible to spammy web sites but it still has a long ways to go. Spammy web sites seem to dominate the results especially blogs from free blog providers. It also appears as though inbound links can be of very low quality and Live Search will not discount them. Keyword rich URLs appear to continue to do very well in the search results as well as pages with little content on them or ones that are simply adsense sites. Hopefully, Microsoft will continue to work on their search algorithms and get rid of the spam to make this search engine more useable and compete with Google, if thats even possible.

Recently, the people that brought you Text-Link-Ads.com, a site for buying and selling web site text links, has another site for boosting profits from your blog call reviewme.com. Once approved, your site will be listed in their database of blogs that will review advertiser’s products and services. Price for a review ranges from $40-500 USD and the blogger receives half of the funds. Pricing depends on the popularity of the blog which uses such factors as its Alexa rating, Technorati rating, etc. Advertisers are not guaranteed a positive review and discretion is with the blogger as to the content of the review.

Google announced today that they would not be charging any transaction fees on the shiny new Checkout service, a competitor to Paypal.

With the holiday season quickly approaching, we wanted to do something to say “thank you” to our merchants. To help out during this very busy shopping season, we are processing all of our merchants’ Google Checkout sales for free during the holidays. From November 8 through December 31, 2006, Google Checkout merchants will receive free processing for all of their Checkout sales, regardless of whether or not they use AdWords. If you don’t currently use Checkout, don’t worry—new Checkout merchants are eligible for this offer as well, so sign up now. To all of our merchants: thank you for contributing to the success of Google Checkout and Happy Holidays!

Google has a neat tool that allows you to insert keywords and it will provide keyphrases based on the keywords you entered and tell you the competition for these keyphrases in their AdWords program and the amount of search traffic they can garner. The tool is very useful for finding related keyphrases that aren’t very competitive but are worth targeting because they get a significant number of searches.

Another obvious tip but it never hurts to point out everything. Make sure you assign unique, keyword rich and descriptive title tags for every web page on your site. The title tag content should mimic keywords that actually exist in the web page content.