News and Announcements

Great news for all Webmasters around, Google opens their Web Master Tools doors to the public. Last November, the search giant announced a pilot program whereby all Go Daddy users got free and easy access to all Webmaster Tools has to offer, right from their account management panels in Go Daddy. Now they’re taking that program and bringing it to the peps!

With access to the Google APIs hosting service provider can now integrate Google Webmaster Tools into your customer’s control panel, so customers can create accounts and submit Sitemaps all without ever leaving your service. From a customers standpoint this is awesome too because it’ll help then understand their traffic and diagnose potential problems by providing insight into how Google crawls and indexes their site.

What if my hoster isn’t offering this yet? No problem. You can still sign up for Web Master Tools the old fashion way simply hop on over to Google click Business Solutions scroll down click on Webmaster Central and then sign in to Webmasters Tools, if you don’t already have an account don’t worry it’s totally free and there’s no obligation.

In addition your account allows you to include as many domains as you want and lets you share info about your web pages directly with Google to help improve the site’s visibility. Similarly you’ll also get up-to-date helpful articles, webmasters guidelines and technical information specifically designed to make your site more search and user friendly.

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For example, you can now add as many pages to the Flash site as you wish - This feature is identical to the method used in their XMl Flash Site Template that allows your content to be loaded onto Flash via an XML file. Similarly, this also lets you circumvent the need to modify FLA source files whenever you need to change some text or move some pictures around.

Besides the fact that it looks very cool due to the 3D interface the ActionScript3 also provides a set of additional functional features. For example, you dont need to understand Flash/ActionScript you simply edit the website’s content in Notepad and you never worry about not having the Adobe Flash software because you’ll never have to recompile the swf file again. Another thing that comes is handy is that all of the sounds are stored as .mp3 files.

As always just to make the template customization part easier they have allocated all symbols in individual folders with appropriate names. For example jpeg and or png files would be within a folder named “bitmaps”. Likewise, you will find a “buttons” folder also for buttons symbols and so forth.

TemplateMonster says this is the first and only template made with ActionScript3 and PaperVision 3D in their collection. But there will be tons more to follow.

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Now that we have (haven’t we?) finally buried the myth behind custom web design vs template customization by showing you how every web designer custom or not uses some form of template regardless and that the only real difference is in the tremendous amount of money you’ll pay to have a site custom made, may be we can now move on to search engine optimization and show you how to generate some real traffic over to them pages; after all aesthetics have no real relevance in search.

In this post Dyfed Lloyd Evan gives you some real insight on tuning-up your site’s PR and explains in layman’s terms how all that works and shows you lots of other helpful hints on how to publicize your site.

For the moment, at least, it seems that Google has won the ’search engine wars’. The search behemoth now has over 78% of the search engine market cornered. This means that 78% of all searches performed on the internet are done via Google.

At the heart of Google’s strategy to delivering search results is an algorithm called ‘Page Rank‘. This is named after Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and is an attempt at measuring the popularity of a web page based, primarily, on the number and quality of links coming into a site. It is this algorithm that, ultimately, determines your site’s rankings within Google’s search results.

How Does Google Work? Over the years many website owners have tried to claim (some even doing so in court) that Google’s algorithm was somehow ‘unfairly’ keeping them from the top of the search engine results. The truth is that Google, as a private company, is not beholden to the millions of website owners who all want their sites to rank well in the search engines. Rather, Google is beholden to its stock-holders and needs to be seen as delivering value to them.

Google needs to earn profits and the company does this by selling advertising. The company has determined that the best way to deliver value for its advertisers is to have the best and most relevant websites be the ones that are easiest to find on the web. Thus Google’s revenues from advertising are tied to Google’s website ranking systems.

What’s Google’s Real relevance in Search? The question of Google’s real relevance in terms of how much search and other traffic comes to a webstie has been a vexed one. I asked this question of a number of my colleagues. We all have large websites in different domains and we pooled our information for the first 6 months of 2008 to arrive at the following figures…

Total search traffic 54.8% of which:
53.7% Google Search Traffic
40.2% Other main search engines (Yahoo!, MSN, Ask, Windows Live etc)
6.1% Other search engines (the tiny ones)

The remaining 45.2% of our traffic all came from link sources: articles, blogs, recommendations, forum posts and links from people referring our websites.

So, only just over half the web traffic comes from the search engines and almost half comes from other links! However, the good news is that the way to garner more search engine traffic and more general ‘link referral’ traffic is one and the same!

How to Rank Well As was mentioned above, Google’s ranking system works with both the number and quality of in-bound links. One of the best ways of getting these links is to write and submit articles. Many article directories have excellent page rank and lots of site visitors. This means that submitting articles and including your URLs in them are a great way of gaining more links to your site. But they’re also a wonderful, direct, way of getting traffic to your site (remember the traffic figures above).

There are, however, a few key SEO considerations to take into account when writing your articles.

Article Links and SEO One big advantage of writing articles is that you can define your own ‘anchor text‘. This is the text in the link that defines what the person looking at the link sees. It also gives the search engine spider following the link an indication of what the page it’s navigating to is all about. This is why you should never, ever, put something like ‘click here’ in your links!

You link text should be related to the subject of the page you’re linking to, as this makes it more relevant to the search engines. Now, if at all possible the text of your links should also match the key words you are targeting on your web pages as these give the keywords more relevance and will improve your rankings for them.

Also, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that term. Indeed, if you are just starting and a keyword is very competitive (’computer’, for example) then you may never, realistically, be able to rank for it. But if you target a keyword like ‘extreme computer construction’ you are far more likely to be ranked for that term. Be clever and don’t try and bite off more than you can chew.

Indeed, the more competitive the keyword you are targeting the more work you will have to put into ranking for that keyword. In this case it may well take you many weeks before you will notice any effects from your article writing efforts.

But for less competitive keywords you may notice a jump of several tens of positions in your rankings with as few as 3 articles. In this case, you get out what you are willing to put in.

One thing to note is that Google takes not of all the link text that comes through to your page. If you have more than 60% of the links with exactly the same text this marks-up a red flag an your rankings may well drop. As a result you should vary the link text and you also need to alter the text surrounding the links.

Given enough time and commitment you can use article marketing to elevate any single web page on your website into multiple top spots in Google’s SERP rankings. However, this does mean that you need to write and publish articles on a daily basis. Few people have that level of commitment to their websites.

About the Author
Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Articles Directory where you can freely submit high quality articles. If you really want high quality back-links to your sight then you need to check out his free eCourse on How to Maximize your Web Traffic.

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Getting to the top of the search engines has never been easy and the bad news is that it has gotten even harder, especially if you are trying to peak Mt. Google

Recently, with respect to information quality, Google raised the bar even higher with another algorithm tweak that effectively reshuffled (and in some cases evaporated) page rank across thousands of web pages.

Thus if your website’s PR (or that of its inner pages) recently stole quietly away in the middle of the night with nary a goodbye take consolation in the knowledge that you are not alone; this calamity has befallen countless others.

The latest Google algorithm tweak/update has been pretty widespread and non-discriminatory in nature, targeting both new sites and well established veteran sites too.

In the good ole days it used to be that a gray page-rank bar was indicative of a website/web page that had been banned from the Google index but that seems to no longer be the case. Lately it would appear that being grayed-out merely reflects a webpage/website that is under probation (of course in certain cases a gray PR band could actually reflect a banned website/web page).

So what does this all really mean?

Google Web Paradise

Understanding Google’s goals and objectives is fundamental to search-engine optimizing your website effectively and correctly within their guidelines. The first thing you need to appreciate is that online search is a business. Google is Top Dog in the search engine business for two very simple reasons:

1. Google returns the most accurate results for any given search query.

2. Of all the search engines, Google has the fastest retrieval rate for almost all queries.

Being number one for both the above listed parameters obviously has major advantages; it ensures that more people flock to use your search engine and, as has been proven time and time again, where the crowds gather the advertisers hover not far behind.

Advertisers want to get the best bang for their buck so they will naturally tend to spend their dollars where they can get the greatest percentage of targeted and relevant eyeballs; which means advertising on the major search engines (of which surprise, surprise) Google is the leader!

Google’s domination of online search is a tangential derivation of the saying “The Richer Get Richer,” because as Google gets better and leaves the other search engines floundering in their dust, more and more people (and advertisers) will naturally tend to gravitate to them!

The New SEO Horizon

The first thing that should be understood is that the debate about the existence of the Google Sandbox has been laid to rest once and for all. It exists and has become even more expansive as well as having gotten more rigid!

As of January 2005, Google had over 100,000 servers with which to store data in its cache index. The cache index is where Google stores a copy of every page that the googlebot crawls on the internet.

Those web pages that eventually make it into the Google Primary Index (the index that displays the resulting listings in response to a query) are the pages that have been evaluated as most relevant and qualified for that particular query.

Web pages or websites that Google evaluates to be comprised of largely duplicate material that is already in its index are relegated to the supplemental index (the backburner). The supplemental index contains web pages and/or websites that Google considers, for all intents and purposes, to be irrelevant.

In other words you do not want your website to end up in the supplemental index because nobody will ever get to see it!

In 2006 Google suffered a very major server-overload crisis. Since then they have acquired several more servers, but this new algorithm tweak/update tends to suggest that they are leaning much more towards the principle of efficiency-and-quality versus volume-and-quantity.

In essence it appears that Google is adopting an approach geared towards maximizing efficiency of storage and organization of data. This by its very nature means restricting the amount of content that gets crawled, cached and eventually indexed (i.e., saves server space) as opposed to trying to accommodate every single piece of data that is drifting across the internet.

This certainly may go some distance explaining the zeal and passion with which they executed operation “gray band” that affected thousands of websites and web pages.

Recovering From Being G-Slapped

If your website/web pages have recently been demoted (loss of page rank) or now shamefully display a grayed-out PR bar where once a shimmering green existed, then your website has indeed been Google slapped!

So where do you go from there?

There’s a saying that states “understanding the nature of the beast is the first step in divining its true intent” (which is just a fancy way of saying: if you know what makes something tick then you’ll be better able to predict its future actions.”

Keeping that in mind, it is possible to deduce the following aspects from the May 2007 Google update:

1. A gray PR band will be the norm for all new websites and web pages; in other words think “probation period.” The length of time the PR bar remains grayed-out for any particular website/web page is dependent upon a number of factors which include:

a) How unique the content on a web page is. Pages that boast highly original and unique content will tend to be released from the gray zone quicker.

b) A web page that has a lot of unique traffic will have a shorter probation period (note that the origin of that traffic is something the search engines factor in to rule out sneaky play by individuals attempting to game the search engines).

c) Links! Links! Links! Yes, when it comes to SEO it is impossible to ignore the link factor. A page that “naturally” acquires a good number of topically related links will experience a shorter probation period.

d) Greater link activity will increase the importance of the destination page whereby such a web page will tend to attain higher PR quicker. This makes sense because a hyperactive links denotes popularity (websites that are popular are so because people find them useful).

e) The amount of time people spend on your site is also an important parameter that the search engines take into account. People tend to spend more time on websites that they find useful and the search engines can determine that fact through the use of sophisticated tracking scripts.

Bottom line: It is becoming increasingly difficult to game the search engines (the use of blackhat techniques) as their algorithms get smarter and more sophisticated.

The May 2007 Google update amply illustrates that Google is aggressively gunning for its vision of Web Paradise which by necessity means smacking down hard on websites that offer little useful function to that vision!

Simply put, if you wish your website to advance up the SERPs you need to make it user oriented. Visitor use and appreciation of a website appears to be the single strongest factor in determining that website’s eventual position on the SERPs in Google’s brave new Web Paradise!

Internet Marketing Online

About the Author

Ba Kiwanuka is the webmaster of http://www.internetbusinessmart.com

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