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Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category



Adobe’s Flash Videos now Searchable through Google

July 1st, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star

Talk to most website designers and most will tell you to be weary of Flash contents when building your site.

While the temptation is great to use Flash to deliver an impressive and flawless presentation to your clients, such usage may also bring about other problematic issues.

Perhaps the most pressing one of them all is the fact that search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, are not able to crawl through the dynamic contents in a flash set up.

This makes it impossible for search engines to rank these web pages and link users to them.

However, times have changed and technology is starting to catch up.

Adobe System Inc. has just announced that they are releasing a customized version of its Flash Player software, which enables search engines, like Google and Yahoo!, to “see” the elements of the web pages embedded in the Flash files. Read the rest of this entry »

tag Posted in Google + SEO + Web Design | comment No Comments »

Are META and ALT tags still important?

May 28th, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star

If you’ve ever wanted to rank higher on the search engines, you’ve likely stumbled on many guides on Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

In general, most of the SEO guides will include a “good SEO” checklist:

  • Links
  • Content is King
  • Sitemaps
  • Keywords in your URL
  • H1 instead of H2

And you’re probably wondering what about META tags.

Background Information:

The META tag was a way to insert text into an HTML page that is only visible to search engines crawlers. Four of the seven major crawlers in the mid-1990s supported the META tag.

Unfortunately, the tag was widely abused and many of the early crawlers dropped the tag from their ranking equation.

Many people also believe that newer search engines never even considered meta keyword tags in their ranking logarithm.

So, is META tags really not worth the trouble or time anymore?

What Google has to say:

As Google is the dominant search engine, we want to see what Google has to say about META tags.

Here are some articles found on the official Google Blog:

So, now we know Google does consider the Title and META description tags.

<meta name=”description” content=”A description of the page”>

This tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations the META description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results.

For more reading:

<title>The title of the page</title>

Although the <title> tag is not technically a meta tag, it is often used with the description tag. The contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results and in the user’s browser when visiting the page or viewing bookmarks.

For more reading:

What about ALT attributes?

ALT tags are “alternative information” source for images on your website. Not all intended audience see the images on your website: people who have chosen to disable images in their browsers, people using text-to-speech browsers, and search engine crawlers.

The Google crawler, or Googlebot, does not see your images but rather it looks at the ALT attribute for a text equivalent of the image to determine what it is about. Thus having an ALT attribute is useful especially for Google Images ranking.

For more reading:

Even though META tags and ALT attributes do not play a big part in your search engine ranking, it’s always better to have proper tags than no tags at all.

tag Posted in SEO + Web Design | comment No Comments »

How Do I Get My Site Listed On Search Engines?

November 25th, 2007 by Sean

Before your website can get listed on a search engine, the search engine must first of all know that your website exists. Search engines do this by using a web crawler.

A web crawler is a program that methodically browses through the websites on the internet and allows the search engine to index them. How a web crawler works can be crudely summarized by these steps.

1. The web crawler visits the webpages that it has previously indexed.
2. It searches those webpages for outbound links.
3. It visits those links and indexes the pages that are new.

These steps are repeated as new webpages are found.

As you can see, the best way to get the search engine to index your page is to get another webpage that is already indexed to link to yours.

The other, less recommended, way of getting your webpage indexed is to submit your webpage URL to the search engine directly. This lets the search engine know that a webpage exists and needs to be crawled. However, this does not guarantee that your webpage will be crawled.

Here are some of the URL submission pages for the more common search engines.

Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Yahoo - http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest
MSN - http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

If you want to submit your webpage URL to the search engines directly, it is recommended that you submit it to Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. This is because online sources say that these search engines sell their search results to the other smaller search engines.

Remember, when building a website, CONTENT IS KING. If you website has good content and is updated frequently with fresh material, people will come and naturally link your webpages.

tag Posted in Google + SEO | comment No Comments »

Useful Links: Search Engine Optimization

August 10th, 2006 by Sean

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a bit of a tricky topic. Good site design and content is the best SEO method there is. That said, there are many sources offering advice on SEO. Some of these SEO sites sell services, others just talk about the issues.

Wikipedia SEO article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO

SEO Today, described as a community of search engine optimization professionals:
www.seotoday.com

Google’s view on SEO services:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

A good site on various SEO topics which includes an extensive collection of user tools related to SEO:
www.seochat.com

Checks Keywords against competition:
www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool/

Tells you the address of backlinks:
www.webuildpages.com/neat-o

Checks when pages are cached:
www.webuildpages.com/cache/cachetoolpublic.pl

Table of all inbound links:
www.marketleap.com/publinkpop

Great tool to find out how high in the rankings for MSN, Google and Yahoo:
www.prsearch.biz

Sandbox Checker and other tools:
www.seomoz.org/tools

Silktide Site Tester:
www.silktide.com

Free Google Sitemap Generator:
www.freesitemapgenerator.com

About Google Sitemaps:
www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

Google’s List of Sitemap tools:
http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

SEO Consultants Directory:
www.seoconsultants.com

Please note a listing above does not endorse a site in any way, it merely provides you the opportunity to check out the site and decide for yourself.

tag Posted in Reference + SEO | comment No Comments »

What is Search Engine Optimization?

July 26th, 2006 by Sean

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is the process in which your Website undergoes redevelopment to properly and best communicate your keywords to search engines.

In order for your Website to rank highly among major search engines, you must understand how they become ranked. Search engines rank Websites based on two major factors:

1. Unique content with pertinent keywords in the body
2. Link popularity - the number of quality incoming links your Website has.

Other important algorithms that determine your ranking with search engines are the architecture of the site, visibility of your content, underlying code and how natural your site appears to the engines.

tag Posted in SEO | comment No Comments »