There seems to be a big debate at the moment regarding if Google should be allowed to send itself traffic from its own search engine. For example if you do a search for “seo” for example you will see that Google is placing an ad to their site when people are searching for certain search terms. The debate at the moment especially for certain web based industries is should Google be allowed to do this and potentially take business and traffic away from my website. At the moment the European Commission is investing this matter along with some other anti trust matters that seem to be on peoples minds as well. This seems to be a tough debate and many people have mixed feelings about how ethical this practice is and if it is even legal. But as people know when it comes to technology such as software and the Internet there are some gray areas when it comes to the law.

I believe that this is a real tough call to make because you can argue both cases. Personally for me this isn’t good for my business because Google is combating SEO’s and Internet marketing companies because they themselves are competing in the same market. Being a SEO myself you can say that my company is directly competing with Google. Because we both profit from providing certain Internet marketing related services and or products. There is absolutely no way that my company or I’m assuming 98% of all of the other websites / Internet business can compete with them either. For example what I do is help you get your website to the top of a Google search. Google promotes ad space on the right hand side of their search engine called Pay Per Click. So essentially we both do the same exact thing which is giving website owners more exposure and traffic from their website by placing their website in strategic locations when a Google user is performing a search. Apparently Google gets over one billion searches a day, so if you were a website owner you would want as many of those daily Google users seeing and visiting your website.

In conclusion it is really up to certain people and or organizations to shed some light on this matter. Because Google basically has a monopoly 90%+ of all searches are done through their search engine there is no option or way for website owners to combat this issue. I think that Google will basically do what they want when they want it because they can. It is up to some Internet gurus to find a way to leverage the playing field. It is the ongoing war for Internet real estate battle because lets face it, just combine Googles, Facebooks and Microsofts annual revenue and you will see why. There is always hope and there is always something the little guys can do to find their place among the big companies because one business especially like Google, usually tends to open up other business opportunities. If Google wants to place their own ads n their website and hinder other websites in their search engine then they have to decide if that is going to impact their public perception and their bottom line.

Google has recently shed some light on the Internet by posting on article that pertains to duplicate content and what it means to webmasters. There has been some confusion on the Internet regarding what duplicate content really means and how it can affect your website in a positive or negative manner.

When we talk about duplicate content we really are talking about on site duplicate content. For example, Google wants to see a website that has unique and different content on all of its pages. This tells Google that they are looking at, indexing and displaying a valuable site for their search engines users.

For example if your website has the same text matter, meta tags, alt tags on all of its pages then Google thinks that your site is either spammy or isnt a valuable resource, therefore they will not rank your site as high as it could have been ranked with unique content on all of its pages.

A great way to look at your website to see if it has duplicate content is to go to Google.com and search

site:www.mydomain.com

This will display all of your website pages in the way that Google views them. take a look at each page and check them to see if they are exactly the same or way to similar to the other pages. If they look very similar to you or even identical then you should edit these pages instantly.

One last thing that comes to mind is that you can also log into Google webmaster tools if you have an account then go to Diagnostics->HTML Suggestions-> Duplicate title tags

The other type of duplicate content that Google is looking at is content that has been borrowed from your website and displayed on another website. There are 2 main reasons why this may happen.

1.) Someone is blatantly stealing your content and taking credit for is

2.) You are syndicating content on your website for other website to use for their own purposes.

A great tool to use in order to find out if your content has been stolen by another website is http://copyscape.com/

If you find that someone is copying your content without your consent then you can contact them and ask for them to have it removed.

If you want to completely avoid others taking your content and getting all of the credit for it you can…

1.) Add a few anchors pointing back to your website in your article. See: “SEO Article Writing”

2.) If you are syndicating your content VIA RSS feeds or doing article submissions, you can alter your text matter just enough so that the original article is pointing and coming from your website. This way other websites that are borrowing your content do not rank higher than you for your own article / content.

Google recently started showing more results for each domain that was searched. For example if you perform a search for google.com for example, you will see www.google.com, google.com/xhtml, www.google.com/analytics and so one. If you notice that each of the first three results Google is displaying for the search “google.com” is showing pages / URL’s from Google.com and not google.com, xyz.com and abc.com. Google has been changing this formula for quite some time and have recently decided to add even more results for the domain you are searching for. Reason being is that Google believes that they should give their users the most relevant feedback after conducting a search and they have the right idea. They have also added a “More results from google.com » “ link under the domain / website you just did a Google search for. If you click More results from Google it will confirm to the search engine that this is what you are looking for, then you will be provided with another results page with even more of relevant links to what you were searching for. These kind of features are what makes Google the superior search engine over Yahoo, Bing and others.

If you would like to see another example of what I am talking about you can do a Google search for site:www.google.com in order to see the same results displayed by Google for a deep search on a particular domain. Also Google has other interesting search commands that can help an experieced search engine marketer or just a every day user. Other Google commands can be found at this link
“http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861” additional search commands can be found here: “http://www.searchcommands.com/google/” I hope this was a informative enough article that will make you go and try some of these out for yourself in order to make your internet and Google using experience a better and more accurate search tool.

Please let me know if you have any questions and I will be more than happy to send you more information regarding Google commands and useful SEO tips.

Recently Facebook has announced the launch of its new mail program that is dubbed to be the Gmail killer. Many say that it is similar to Google wave and Facebook states that it is meant for emailing and chat as opposed just to another email program like hotmail, ymail and or gmail.

Honestly I believe that when someone names something the “X Killer” it is a desperate move in order to create a buzz about the product. You never see the bigger company such as McDonalds advertising that Burger King is inferior, but you see BK doing the opposite to McDonalds. This means that it is a desperate move by the smaller / inferior company to take small jabs at the big boys.

I believe that most of the mailing programs are all the same for the most part. Sure there are a few small features that stick out but in all reality, if Google couldn’t or didn’t do it, then what makes Facebook that much better. Also it makes you wonder if multi-billion dollar company leaves something out then it’s probably for a reason.

The point that I am trying to make is that I am not a believer in anything called the …. Killer. It shows that a company that is less inferior is trying desperate measures to take cheap shots at the bigger company. But on the other side of the spectrum who know, I suppose we should all try the mail / chat program to see if it is anything special, then we can decide for ourselves.

An SEO audit is the first step towards formulating your SEO campaign. An audit should provide a detailed review of where a website is currently at in regards to its on-site and offsite optimization. Every SEO company should provide an audit to their clients as a point of reference to jump off from. After analyzing a site’s weaknesses and strengths, it is then time to prioritize the strategies that will need to be implemented in order to improve the organic search rankings and overall visibility.

An audit report can be one page listing just a few factors to a multiple paged and detailed report. Many companies that provide SEO services use software to generate a simple audit report that is not even all that accurate. A thorough and hands on analysis by and SEO expert that can provide a report with accuracy is the best way to go.

A good SEO consultant should know exactly how to breakdown the process of analyzing a website. Keywords are the foundation of any website. Knowing the exact keywords that are being targeted is very important. Compare what the site is currently doing to target those keywords. Are the keywords being placed in the correct locations such as the title and Meta description tags?

The search engines love dynamic and informative content. Every page should have sufficient content but don’t overdo it. Users love reading original and fresh content, it will keep them coming back to your site. If there is any duplicate content on your site you need to remove it. Also remember to repeat your targeted keywords in your content, but avoid too much repetition it should sound natural.

Review your site architecture and how it affects the search engines. Avoid using frames, Flash, or Java applets to build the parts of the site that you want Google to index. Search engines need to see content in order to list pages. The Google spiders need a crawlable link structure to browse the pathways of the site. Does the webpage have a sitemap? A sitemap will give the search engine spiders a way to crawl all of your website pages and not get stuck anywhere.

Analyzing all of the on-site factors starting with the metadata (titles, headings, description, body text, etc.) and improving that, as to what is currently in the website. There are many other SEO factors to check and be aware of such as, webpage loading time, excessive use of 302 redirects, 404 errors, web compliance and any excessive coding errors.

All of these factors should be carefully analyzed. Automated tools are good to give you a general overview but a professional from a reputable SEO company can analyze and interpret that data.

Every business needs publicity to reach its audience. Getting the word out through publicity and brand awareness is what builds more credibility. A press release basically is a free yet effective way to get publicity. Press releases are an effective marketing tool to gain visibility to the world. Not only will a press release bring traffic to your businesses website it can show up in Google’s search results in as little as 24 hours. Unlike the long term organic SEO campaign for a website, with the proper SEO techniques, press releases will get indexed and can show up instantly on the first page.

On any given day there are thousands of press releases being distributed by the leading wire services. Publishing a well-optimized press release has the power to give you great exposure, especially if you publish it on recognized sites Remember the amount of visibility you can get from a press release depends heavily on how well optimized and how well-written your press release is. In order to set your press release apart from the pack you need to effectively implement the use of search engine optimization.

SEO doesn’t really matter if your content doesn’t interest the reader. Make sure that people outside of your specific industry can also understand the press release. You need to capture the attention of your audience with some newsworthy information. If the press release is just written as an advertisement people will not be interested in reading it and you will also lose the benefit of having any traffic spill over to your website or blog.

Choosing the right keywords and phrases for your press release is an important part of the process of SEO. The use of keywords needs to be utilized throughout the press release. They are especially important in the title. The title of the press release often becomes the title tag on pr distribution sites and the title tag is a very important part of what helps a page rank for a search term.

Your keywords should be relevant to the content. Be specific with your keywords for example instead of “jacket” you can specify to “black leather jacket”. Long tail keywords will help you get better targeted traffic to read the press release. The Google keyword tool is very useful in helping to find relevant keyword ideas.

The press release should be broken down into five technical parts: title, summary, body, about the company and press contact. It is important to optimize throughout the pr as search engines will pick out parts that contain the searched keywords to use as the summary in the search engine results. If you follow these basic steps you will boost your exposure and visibility to users searching for your product or service.

Look out Google, there is a new search engine out that is coming to take your place. Yeah right! That will never happen, but I wouldnt be surprised if they took over Bings or Yahoos market share. Blekko Beta was just released a few days ago, and the uniqueness of Blekko is that it provides SEO data such as inbound links, hosting information and other cool analytical information. Another really cool feature of Blekko is that they have a function called Slash tag. What this does is it allows the user / searcher to knock out or include certain websites. This is really cool because the user can get the results they are looking for, eliminating the unwanted websites from the users search results. If you would like to check this search engine out for yourself you can do so by visiting their website www.blekko.com

The downside of blekko is that it is too new for anyone to tell if they will be a permanent fixture in the search engine industry, if they will die out like cuil.com or will it explode to be like Google. No one knows yet, but in my opinion Google is way too far ahead for anyone else to effect their market share by a significant amount. If you would like to check out the cool SEO features this search engine offers than I suggest you type in something like this in order to get a feel for the analytical data they provide.

http://blekko.com/ws/marketraise.com+/seo

On this page you can view inbound links, crawl stats, site pages, compare your site to competitors, and a duplicate content function as well.

The only thing that I am personally skeptical about is, who can we trust for the most accurate analytical info when, Google webmasters, Google analytics, Google inbound link command, Yahoo site explorer inbound link search, Alexa, Compete, Awstats and bow Blekko are all showing me different stats and analytical data for my website…

I would trust… Umm… no one. take all of the info you get and analyze it even more and come up with your own. I personally lean more towards Google analytics and Alexa. They have the credibility and the history / track record and I feel that they have more accurate data than most. But no one is or will be 100% either. There are way too many variables involved for software to ever be 100% accurate, also I tend to use different software for researching different things. i.e. I use Yahoo for checking links, Google analytics for checking bounce rate, map overlay and etc. and Alexa for my overall traffic rank and my U.S. traffic rank.

There are so many tools and companies trying to get a piece of the search engine and SEO market. Time will tell who will prevail and who will die trying just like cuil.com and other search engines that many people have never heard of. But I would check out Blekko in order to formulate your own opinion if you think it is a useful resource and if this new search engine brings a great value to the table or not.

Speed is the name of the game. One of the main factors in the evolution of the internet is speed. Our patience on the internet is becoming tested. Users have come to expect instant search results and fast loading websites. Internet service providers have to offer more bandwidth and websites have to provide us with instant page loads. Gone are the days where you sit and watch as the page is loading, people just won’t stand for it anymore.
For some time now Google has been using page load time in its page rank algorithm. Page load speed was introduced to the Google algorithm with the rollout of Google’s Caffeine release. What this means is that for similar sites, the site that loads faster is going to be ranked higher. Page load speed is not the only or even the primary factor, but it is a factor. The winner here is the internet user who is provided with a better and more efficient searching experience. Who likes visiting a site and then having to wait till some flash movie loads?

Google has the technology that measures your page load time. This is done in two ways. The first is how fast your site responds to Googlebot, which is the program that crawls websites for indexing. The second is actually your page loading time versus your competitor’s page loading time.
Google offers a tool in their webmaster tools that you can use to analyze your sites speed. A page speed report was added to Webmasters Tools in the “Labs” section. The report shows how fast your site loads, specifically calls out several pages on your site, and offers suggestions to improve the page speed. If you haven’t started your Google Webmaster account, be sure to get started right away. Google will identify for you pages that are loading slowly and will compare your site speed with competitive sites.
If any of your pages are ranked as slow then you will want to take the time with to make the necessary design and structural changes to strip down your code and images to speed up your site’s loading time. A goal is to have your pages load in less than a second. This change will improve your search rankings and improve the user’s search experience.

There are many steps you should take to speed up the loading time of your website. Optimizing your website images is very important. Making your images smaller without changing the dimensions is easy enough to do if you have Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks. Most sites have at least one JavaScript that needs to load before a visitor can see the web page and if you have more than one, you can combine them and then add a small piece of html code to your webpage to call on the script. Use a CSS layout structure instead of a table based design. Another way is to breakup long pages into shorter pages. The more pages the better.

Link building is the process of creating inbound links to ones own website. It is probably one of the quickest and best ways to increase your website’s popularity. Inbound links also known as backlinks are incoming links to your site. Search engines look at the number of these links to judge how popular a site is. The amount of inbound links to your site is important but there are many other factors that are also looked at such as the quality and relevance of that incoming link.

Link popularity is one of the largest factors that search engines look at to rank sites accordingly. In the case of link building quality is better than quantity. The bottom line is that you need a lot of links from quality sites to rank well. These quality sites are also known as “authority” sites. An authority site is measured by its combination of size, importance, relevance and is one that is highly ranked in the search engines. Every industry has a handful of these influential authority sites. These sites usually contain all or most of the following characteristics:
- Lots of relevant and dynamic content
- Tons of WebPages, they can easily number in the thousands
- Most of them have high Google page ranks
- Professional appearance to their website
- Many links from similarly themed websites
Getting a link from an authority site within your industry will help tremendously boost your rankings.

Link building can be a time consuming and long term process, you do have the option of hiring an SEO company that includes link building as a part of their SEO services. If you
are a do it your-selfer it is possible and at a lower or no cost. Some of the following techniques I will discuss are proven methods and can be very effective if done correctly.

Social media sites are a great resource when it comes to link building. The key here is to write dynamic content that will capture the reader’s attention and will help you gain a lot of targeted traffic to your site. As far as social bookmarking goes you should avoid using automated software, because Google may see it as automated content and will just ignore it. The best way is simply manually with the use of good titles and descriptions.

Writing and submitting a press release is a great way to announce a new product or service or any other company news you would like to send out to the public. There are a great number of press release sites out there, which will assist you in gaining backlinks in a short period of time. Writing and submitting original articles to article directories is another way to gain powerful inbound links.

Another quick link building technique is to submit to directories. There are many free directories on the web to quickly submit a link to. Paying directories to include a link is another method for link building that is debated. Some directories are worth it such as Yahoo while others are not as valued.

Following these techniques will get your link building campaign off and running. Remember link building is not a one time practice and to devote some time each day towards your link building strategy.

Writing and creating new content is one of the most important aspects of an SEO campaign. Writing a standard article is just not enough to assist you in getting higher search engine rankings. There are SEO friendly techniques that should be applied to an article that will help contribute to the optimization of your website. Well written quality articles will help tremendously in boosting your SEO efforts Of your SEO Company.

First decide on what topic to write your article on. An article should be original and should provide some kind of valuable information to the reader. If your article is not original, Google will count it as spam. If the article is not informative or doesn’t have a point people will not want to read it, it’s as simple as that.

A good title is one of the most important aspects of your article. Your title should be relevant to your overall article and not be misleading. The title should have any of the important keywords that are in your article. For example if you are writing an article about web design then the phrase “web design” should be included into the title.

Keywords should be utilized in the content of your article. Keywords are words or phrases that generally describe the content of your article. These are words that users are most likely to type into a search engine when they are searching the web for information related to your content. So for example some keywords for an article on “travel” may include: “cheap travel,” “travel tips,” “last minute travel” and “budget travel.” People that are searching for these keywords will find your article and read it due to its relevancy and informative content.

The search engines rank content that is generated based on the frequency of the keywords used, as well as the relationship of those keywords and your article. Keyword density is the proper amount of keyword usage in an article. Proper keyword density in your article can mean the difference in getting ranked higher in the search engine results. There is no exact percentage but generally around 3.0% to 3.5% is the proper keyword density percentage for an article. You can check this by using a keyword density checker tool. Search engines not only check the keyword density in an article, but they also evaluate where else in the article the keywords are used. Certain places rank as more important than others. One such place is in the headings. The next highest ranked positions are in the first and last paragraphs of the article.

Remember to always focus on writing original and informative articles with well placed keywords. Avoid stuffing the content with keywords as it will be seen as the search engines will see it as spamming, and will penalize you.