Leave a CommentGoogle Search Options
Google’s New Search Options Earlier this year Google launched a side panel called “Search Options” which allows users to refine their search results. Yesterday they expanded the available options to include a number of new filters. google-search-optionsNow when you perform a Google search, but clicking the “show options” link at the top left, you can filter your results with the following options: Past Hour & Specific Date Range This option will allow you to filter results based on a specific time period. Say you are researching some current events, by selecting the “past hour” you will remove any similar news stories from the past and be left with the freshest information at your fingertips. For instance, say you want information on the latest tsunami, a regular search for “tsunami” displays Wikipedia’s definition of the word, and some info of the 2004 disaster, but by clicking “past 24 hours” the search results are entirely related to the events of the past few days. More Shopping Sites & Fewer Shopping Sites This tool is handy whether you are doing market research for a product or looking to actually order it.
By increasing the number of shopping sites displayed, you can more easily locate an online retailer to purchase from; decreasing will show you more review and informational websites. Visited Pages & Not Yet Visited This is relatively self explanatory – This filter will weed out all pages you have either seen, or not seen. This is particularly helpful if you are trying to find a site you have visited in the past. Note: This feature only works when logged into your Google Account with Web History enabled. Books, Blogs, & News If you only want to see results from Blogs, News or Book sites, then these options are for you. These 9 new options were created to help make the end search experience easier.
If you are searching for something very specific, consider giving some of these a try to weed out the stuff you are not interested in.
The way of the world.
It is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea . It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. It is tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.
Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one.
The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.
The Butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig grower.
The pig grower takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.
The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town prostitute that in these hard times, gave her service on credit.
The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.
The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything. At that moment, the rich tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, after saying that he did not like any of the rooms, and leaves town. No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Western world is doing business today.
Using Google News – Ranking in News Search “some good results”
The moral of the story is that there are a lot of things you can look at if you are serious about getting traffic from Google News, whether you are already being picked up or not. The best part is that most of it is straight from Google itself.
http://www.twitter.com/weareatalyst
http://www.wearecatalyst.co.uk
http://reachdm.wordpress.com
Top 10 SEO Blogging TIPS
Much has been written on the topic of search engine optimisation for bloggers – but let me give you a few basic first steps:
1. Content is King
The quality of the posts you write is the single most important factor when it comes to Search Optimisation on a Blog. I suspect others will argue differently but as I look at my own blogs success in the search engines I’d say that this has been the number one factor.
Quality content that helps people will quite often draw a reader to want to share what they’ve written – of course they do this by passing on the link to your post and often they’ll do it in a way that helps your search rankings (on their own blog for example).
2. Anticipate What People Will be Searching For
Every time you write a post you should be automatically be considering what words people might be putting into search engines to find that type of information. Once you know what kinds of words they’re using you’re in a great position to position yourself for that search.
3. Titles Titles Titles
There are a number of things to keep in mind when it comes to titles. Google pays particular attention to titles – so make sure you get them right:
* first make sure that the way you set your blog up puts the title of your post in the ‘title tags’ on the back end of your blog. This is really important.
* if you’re just looking from an SEO perspective don’t include your blog name in the title tags of single posts. This dilutes your keywords. Of course if you’re looking more at branding including your blog’s name in the title tags might be worth doing.
* next – include the keywords that you identified in point #2 in your post title
* also, keep in mind that the words you use at the start of a title tend to carry more weight than words you use later in your title
4. Keywords in other parts of your post
Use the keywords you identified in point #2 within your post also. If you want Google to rank you for a term or phrase you need to use that term or phrase. Use it in sub headings in your post (use h tags where you can), use it in the content itself, use the words in the alt tags of images etc. Don’t go over the topic but do use the words where you can naturally in the post.
5. Link to Your Own Posts
Don’t over do this one but while links from other sites are a great way to increase your blog’s rankings so are links from your blog. Interlink your posts to share where readers can find more information on your topic (where relevant) but also consider linking to key posts on your blog from other places on the blog (sidebar, front page etc).
6. Links from Outside Your Blog
Links from other sites to yours are key in SEO but they can be hard to get. Start to linking to your blog from other sites that you have or are active on. Some (like on Twitter) won’t count for anything much as they have no-follow tags but they are all potential ways for people to access your site and some will help with SEO.
Don’t become obsessed with getting links – rather become obsessed about writing great content and the links will generally come in time. However if you’ve written a great post that you think will be relevant to another blog don’t be afraid to let that blogger or website owner know about it – they could just link up.
Also – take note of the type of posts that you write that do well at getting other sites to link to you. You can learn a lot about generating linkable content by doing so and might just develop a technique that will work again and again.
7. Plugins
I don’t tend to do much to the back end of my blog to alter things like meta tags – but there are some good plugins around if you’re using WordPress that can help with some of this and that may give you a small edge. Check out 9 SEO plugins that every WordPress Blog Should have for some suggestions on this.
8. Readers Begat Readers
This isn’t an SEO technique as such but it plays a part. The more readers you have the more likely your blog is to be found by other readers. There’s a certain ’snowballing’ thing that happens on a site over time – as you get readers quite often momentum grows as those readers pass on your site to others in their network. They link to you, they bookmark you, they tweet about you, they email friends about you, they blog about you, they suggest your site in recommendation engines….
Not all of this counts with SEO but some does and the accumulation of it over time all certainly helps to grow both organic and search traffic. I guess what I’m saying is to get readers any way you can – don’t just focus upon ‘SEO’ as such. It all counts.
My Hunch with SEO
As a blogger your job should be to provide the best information that you can.
It strikes me that Google have an ever increasing way of working out if your information is good. It’s not just about what keywords you have or how many links that you get – but these days they own Feedburner (know how many people subscribe to your blog and what links people are clicking on), they own Google Reader (again giving them all kinds of great data), they own Gmail, Google Analytics, YouTube etc…..
Now they may or may not use all the data in their ranking of sites but they certainly could know a lot about your blog and the posts you write. There’s also been increasing talk over the last 6 months or so about how easy it’d be for search engines to start generating data on what content is being shared in social networks and bookmarking sites.
My hunch is that many traditional SEO methods are less important (NOT irrelevant though) and that other factors are increasingly going to come into play. I’m sure that some will work out ways to manipulate this (SEO 2.0?) but increasingly the way to get ranked high in Google will be that you just need to keep producing great content and making sure that it’s sneezed out to your network.
Help this process along by giving your readers way to share your content (and seed it to social networks) as well as to become subscribers.
http://www.twitter.com/weareatalyst
http://www.wearecatalyst.co.uk
http://reachdm.wordpress.com
Keep it flat
Because search engines like to access quickly and easy to any file, you shouldn’t go too deep in your structure directory. Avoid things such as:
http://domain.com/shop/products/boats/motor/red_one.html
and use something like:
http://domain.com/products/motor-boats/red_one.html
Keep in mind that any page shouldn’t be more than three clicks away from your home page
Dont say it twice
Duplicate content can be dangerous to your search engine rankings. But, what is duplicate content?
If you have a WordPress blog, you probably have a category and archives pages in your sidebar. These pages are just a collection of your posts, so you could have identical content in some of them: for example, when you have just a post in a category or in a given day, the content in that archive/category page will be the same as the post itself.
You can solve these and others duplicate content problems by using noindex, follow in your robots meta tag, using a 301 redirect or with a robots.txt file.
Add a robots.txt File to Your Root Directory
By default, search engines crawl and index everything in a website. You can block some files or folders that aren’t relevant or don’t want to get indexed by placing a robots.txt in your root folder. An example of a robots.txt could be:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /js/
Why Be Topical?
There are numerous ways the engines can run topical analysis to determine whether two pages (or sites) cover similar subject matter. Years ago, Google Labs featured an automatic classification tool that could predict, based on a URL, the category and sub-category for virtually any type of content (from medical to real estate, marketing, sports and dozens more). It’s possible that engines may use these automated topical-classification systems to identify “neighbourhoods” around particular topics and count links more or less based on the behaviour they see as accretive to their quality of ranking results.
I personally don’t worry too much about topical relevance – if you can get a link from a topic agnostic site (like NYTimes.com) or a very specific blog on a completely unrelated subject (maybe because they happen to like something you published), I’m bullish that these “non-topic-specific” endorsements are likely to still pass positive value. I think it’s somewhat more likely that the engines might evaluate potential spam or manipulative links based on these analyses. A site that’s never previously linked-to pharmaceutical, gambling or adult topic regions may appear as an outlier on the link graph in potential spam scenarios.
