Last week, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed to support the Sitemap 0.9 protocol. How can this new standard help you to improve the ranking of your web site in search engines?
Dynamically created web pages often cause problems with search engines. If your web pages are dynamically created, it's likely that many search engines have difficulty to index them.
Seems to me that doing a simple query on Google and then having a glance at the amount of results returned isn't really the best way to gauge how competitive a keyword or keyphrase is. This figure represents all the pages in Google's index which are even only a small bit relevant for the query, it does not give a fair indication of the amount of naturally relevant pages or the pages which have been specifically optimised to appear for the searched upon query.
There are a number of "wishes" that I have for Google's future. While I would like number one ranking for all of my important keywords and phrases, but I would be willing to settle for Google acknowledging at least a few of my wishes that will benefit the search community as a whole.
Google started out as the beloved child, a fledgling start up that was all heart, and today they are a "hated" brand. Why the fall from grace? In some ways Google is a victim of the too big, too powerful, and too successful affliction that attacks companies that achieve a level of success that few companies dream of. Now that does not mean that I am giving them a pass, they have room to improve and I really do not hate them. I just think there is a lot of areas they could improve.
If you read this newsletter regularly, you will know that there are many factors that can influence the ranking of a web page on search engines. A factor that is overlooked by many webmasters is the click distance.
What is click distance?
Click distance is the number of clicks it takes to get to a web page from the home page of your web site. If you need 5 clicks from your home page to go to page A and 2 clicks from you home page to get to page B then page B has a smaller click distance than page A.
All search engines have their own algorithms to determine the value and, therefore, positioning of websites. While the majority of SEO work tends to concentrate on Google because of the sheer weight of searches they receive it would be foolish to discount or ignore the other major search engines. Yahoo is considered one of the big three along with Google and MSN and by concentrating a little more time and effort on Yahoo optimization it is quite possible to gain a good amount of traffic. With ultra competitive keywords it may actually provide an easier way to generate search traffic than gearing all your efforts solely towards Google.
Matt Cutts works at the Googleplex and in his blog he writes about Google and search engine optimization traps. In one of his latest blog posts, Matt Cutts wrote about Google's PageRank.
Here are the most important statements about Google's PageRank:
Run a search on any of the 200 major search engines, and the results will come up in similar orders on quite a few of them. How a website owner/operator gets their website to the top of a list is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Optimizing a website involves many of the same techniques, whether the aim is to optimize for Google adwords, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves or others. There is a list of what not to do as well, and that list is applicable to all engines, as it mostly refers to tricks and hacks unscrupulous designers use to try to trick the engines. These kind of pages generally get removed by automated tools and don't generally last very long, so they are not recommended to bother with.
Well the day has finally come. Microsoft stepped up to bat and it's hit in the air, it's going, going it's off the fence for a ground rule double. What I'm referring to has noting to do with the pennant race it has more to do with the search engine race. As we know MSN is the proverbial third place finisher in the search engine race. Over recent months their market share has continued to slowly dwindle. Microsoft has been accused of missing the mark with search. Bill Gates himself has stated this fact. Improvement with their search service has been long overdue.