Heath Ledger was number one in ‘died’ searches, ahead of Sir Edmund Hillary in sixth, while Elvis and ‘The Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin also made the list.

Miley Cyrus was the third most searched celebrity behind Brown and Obama. Britney Spears was sixth and Amy Winehouse ninth.

Rugby tickets topped the most searched tickets list, ahead of the All Blacks and the Warriors.

And the detox, lemon and free diets topped the most searched diets for 2008, while Valentines and Orbit were the most searched restaurants.

Here are some of the top 10 lists for most searched terms in 2008:

Companies in the US spent $10 billion last year on paid search ads, and even more this year. How much money do you think was spent on Search Engine Optimisation?

According to SEMPO’s data, it’s 11% for SEO and 87% for PPC (with another 1.4% for SEM technologies and <1% for paid Inclusion). So why are companies spending so much on Adwords and so little on SEO?

Going by this image from Eyetool’s most consumers are focused on the organic listings so way do people shy away from SEO and put most of their budget into paid ads when organic results can be influenced with SEO techniques. Info found on Enquiro:

Organic Ranking Visibility

(shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)

Rank 1

]]> http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?feed=rss2&p=28 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=11 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=11#comments Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:40:10 +0000 admin http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=11 We are lucky in New Zealand in some way that Google has a 90 - 95% share of the market so ranking well in Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves is not really a requirement unless you are trying to capture a world wide market.The more things change, the more they stay the same. Though there have been wide sweeping changes in the organic search engine landscape over the past six months, the fundamental ways search engines operate remains the same.

This question, or variants on it, reflects a shared notion among some webmasters that SEO driven placements at one search engine might come at the expense of high rankings across the other search engines. As the thinking goes, the techniques used to make a well optimized web site rank well at Google might somehow prevent that same site from achieving high rankings at Yahoo, MSN and/or Ask. Alternately, webmasters and advertisers who already have great placements at Google but not at the others appear wary of sacrificing their Google rankings in pursuit of higher placements on Yahoo, MSN or Ask. The differences between how each engine works appears to be causing a bit of confusion among webmasters and search marketers, especially regarding how to optimize well for all four at the same time.

Techniques that work on one engine might not work as well on another. In some extreme cases, techniques that work brilliantly with old school engines like MSN and Ask, and even Yahoo, are prone to a kiss of death on Google.

There is one search engine friendly site design and optimization philosophy that works, almost every time, without fail. Good content, smart networking, and persistence over time. A well constructed web site, or one that has been treated by a good search engine optimizer, should be able to rank well on all major search engines, provided that site has useful, relevant information to express.

Questions about ranking well on all four engines brings up some of the basic differences between the major search engines and, in light of so much change in the sector over the past few months, a look at what search engines look at, and how they do it seems in order.

There are a lot of differences between the major search engines but, by in large, they all gather information the same way. Each major search engine uses unique spider agents known as Googlebot, Slurp (Yahoo/Inktomi), Ask.com/Teoma, and MSNbot, that finds information by following links from document to document across the web. Spiders are designed to revisit sites on a semi-regular basis as well, though they often hit the index (or home) page more often than other pages. Spiders do tend to dig deeper looking for changes to internal documents based on changes to the index (or home) page. This allows the engines to maintain rapidly updating versions of the web, or parts of the web, in separate proprietary databases.

Each search database has its own characteristics and most importantly, each engine has its own algorithms for sorting and ranking web documents. Getting information into those databases is the first stage of SEO. The site needs to be constructed (or reconstructed) in such a way as to allow search spiders to easily read and absorb the information and content contained on them.

Assuming realistic expectations and goal setting are already part of the equation, the success or failure of any multi-engine optimization campaign is dependent on the type of site being marketed, as much as it depends on methods and techniques used to market it. If the ultimate goal is strong search engine placements across all major search engines, a few compromises in style might be a temporary necessity in order to expose the great content and reap the rewards of multiple rankings.

Before beginning the building or construction of a site, having a working knowledge of the major on and off-site elements each search engine looks at when examining and evaluating a site and its contents is a key starting point.

There are two overall areas all search engines examines when ranking a web document or site known as “on-page? and “off-page”. As their names indicate, search engines examine factors and elements that occur on the document or site in question as well as factors and elements occurring on other documents and sites related by links or by topical theme.

While the search algorithms of each engine might differ in the number of factors found on or off page and the overall importance of those factors, they all examine generally similar sets of data when deciding which should rank where in relation to whatever search-queries are entered.

For example, Google loves links, as does Yahoo, MSN and to a lesser degree, Ask. MSN and Ask are considered to be old school search engines, allowing simpler SEO techniques to work quite well, as they still do with Yahoo.

On-page factors are generally found in one of four areas, Titles, Tags, Text and Structure, while off-page elements tend to involve links, locality, search-user behaviors and the performance of competing sites. Here is a breakdown of the most important factors each search engine considers, roughly laid-out in order of importance.

Google: Incoming Links, On-page SEO, Site Design Spider ability, User analytics, Outgoing links, Inclusion in other Google indexes, Document Histories

Yahoo: On-page SEO, Links and Link Patterns, Site Design, User analytics, Inclusion in other Yahoo indexes, Document Footprints

MSN: On-page SEO, Site Design and Structure and spider ability

Ask: On-page SEO, Site Design, Site Structure and Spider ability.

Because Google is the largest player of all organic search traffic, SEO’s, webmasters, and search advertisers tend to be most concerned with Google placements. When planning a search optimization campaign, whether for a new site or in the redevelopment of an existing site, building around Google’s needs is obviously the most logical path. It is also a smart way to find your way into the other search engines. Though each of the rival engines want to present the best possible results, Google’s algorithms account for quality scoring to a deeper degree than the others do. In other words, if your site meets Google’s various tests, it will likely meet those of the other engines.

Google puts an enormous weight on its evaluation of the network of links leading to and out from every web document in its index. Most, if not all, documents found in Google’s index got there because Google’s spider Googlebot found it by following an inbound link. Because its ranking algorithm is so heavily link dependent, Google is frequently forced to tinker with how it evaluates links, a process that generates a score known as PageRank.

The basic wisdom on links says that incoming links from topically relevant sites are beneficial while those placed in order to get a better ranking at Google are not. Google also examines links on a document or site that are directed towards other sites in order to gauge if a webmaster is trying to game it or not by participating in link-networking schemes. To one degree or another, the three other major search engines do this as well, though MSN and Ask are not known for using link analysis as a weighty measure of site or document relevancy. Yahoo most certainly does. Link analysis is used to determine the seriousness and credibility of a web document by comparing it with other documents it is associated with.

Once a document exists in a search engine database, several on-page factors are examined. The engines tend to examine several elements of any particular document and the sites they are associated with including title, meta tags (in some cases), body text and other content, and internal site structure.

The key to providing search spiders with a strong on-page experience lies in presenting search spiders with a well designed, topically focused site. Again, remember the four basic on-page areas; titles, tags, text and site structure, creating documents that are friendly to all four search engines is not terribly difficult.

There are a few easy tips that should be kept in mind though. New web sites should always introduce themselves to the search engines with very focused content expressed on a very basic site structure. Adding content as time goes forward is a much better way to feed search spiders than giving them a site that is already full of information. Search engines, especially Yahoo and Google, appreciate fresh content and can be “invited” back to a site again and again when new material is added.

Webmasters with pre-existing web sites enjoying great rankings in one place but seeing sub-standard rankings in others should take a step back and re-evaluate the overall theme presented by the documents that make up their sites. In a technically perfect world, the most relevant and topical documents would reach the top of the rankings. As the search engines really are striving for a measure of technical perfection, ensuring your documents are tightly and topically focused is essential.

For those who have lost position at Google but not at the other search engines recently, check your link networks for undesirable connections. Good placement at MSN, Ask and Yahoo but sub-standard placement at Google is almost always a signal that some links going to or coming from your site have raised questions at Google. You should also check the content your site carries to be sure it is (as much as possible), original and not simply a copy of content found on other sites.

In the end, the best practices tend to win with the major search engines. A good web site or document should be able to place well across all four engines at the same time, provided the webmaster or SEO specialist takes time to follow SEO best practices.

]]> http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?feed=rss2&p=11 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=47 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=47#comments Thu, 16 Oct 2008 02:34:10 +0000 admin http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=47 Search engine optimisation is on every webmaster’s mind these days. Achieving a favorable ranking for the right keywords can mean a steady stream of targeted traffic to your site, and all for free - that’s hard to beat. The key to high search engine rankings is structuring your website correctly, including plenty of content that is relevant to your keywords, and making sure your website is spider-friendly. You can use this checklist to make sure all of your Web pages can be found, indexed and ranked correctly:Your website is themed. Your site deals with an identifiable theme which is obvious from the text on the home page and reinforced by all the other pages on your site. In other words, all the individual Web pages relate to each other and deal with various aspects of some central theme. The text on your home page should state clearly what that theme is and what your website is about, and the other pages should reinforce that.

Your Web pages have enough high quality, relevant content. Spiders come to your website looking for content. If a page doesn’t have much content, or the content doesn’t appear closely related to the page’s title and your website’s theme, the page probably won’t be indexed or if it is indexed it won’t rank well. Search engines love quality content and lots of it - content is what Web searchers are looking for and search engines try to provide.

Your website’s navigational structure is relatively flat. You don’t want important pages to be too “deep” within your website, meaning it takes several clicks to get there from the home page. Search engines typically index the home page first, then gradually index other pages on a site over time. Many spiders are programmed to only go three layers deep - if some of your important content is buried deeper than that, it may never be found and indexed at all.

You’ve created a unique “Title” tag for each page. The title is one of the most important aspects of any Web page from an SEO standpoint, especially for Google (which is the most important search engine to optimize for). Don’t use a generic title for all your pages, use the keywords your targeting for that page and keep it brief but descriptive.

You use the “Description” meta tag. Contains a highly descriptive sentence about the content and purpose of your page, and contains your most important keyword phrase early in the sentence. Not all of the search engines will display this “canned” description when they list the page in search results, but many of them will, so it’s worth getting it right.

You use the “Keywords” meta tag. As with the meta tag description, not every search engine will use the keywords meta tag. But some will use it and none will penalize you for having it. Also, having a short list of the keywords you’re targeting will help you write appropriate content for each page. The keyword tage should contain your targeted keyword phrase and common variations, common misspellings and related terms. Make sure your keywords relate closely to the page content and tie into the overall theme of your site.

Your keywords are included in the visible page content, preferably high up on the page. You have to achieve a balance here - you want to include keyword phrases (and variations) a number of times within your text, but not so many times that you appear to be guilty of “keyword stuffing”. The trick is to work the keywords into the text so that it reads as naturally as possible for your site visitors. Remember, you can incorporate keywords into any Web page element that is potentially viewable by site visitors - header text, link text and titles, table captions, the “Alt” attribute of the image tag, the “title” attribute of the link tag, etc.

Every page of your website can be reached by search engine spiders. This is critical - if your pages can’t be found, they can’t be indexed and included in search results, let alone rank well. Search engines use spiders to explore your website and index the pages, so every page must be accessible by following text links. If pages require a password to view, are generated by a script in response to a query, or have a long and complicated URL, spiders may not be able to read them. You need to have simple text links to the pages you want indexed.

You’ve included a site map. Unless your site is very small, it’s a good idea to create a site map with text links that you link to the site map from your home page. In addition to a link, include descriptive text for containing the relevant keywords for each page.

You link to your most important pages from other pages on your site. Internal links help determine page rank since they show which pages of your site are most important. The more links you have to have to a page, relative to other pages on your site, the more importance search engines will assign to it.

You use keywords in your link text. When you create a text link to another page on your site, use that page’s targeted keywords as the text for the link (inside the anchor tags that create the link). Make it as descriptive as possible. For example, a link that says “Premium Customized Widgets” is much better than one that says simply “Product Page”, and indicates to search engine spiders what that linked page is about.

Your site doesn’t use frames. If possible, don’t use frames on any page you want to get indexed by search engines. If you feel you simply must use frames for a page, then also make use of the “noframes” HTML tags to provide alternative text that spiders can read (and make that text descriptive rather than just a notice that “This site uses frames etc. etc.”).

You don’t use automatic page redirects. Don’t make any pages automatically redirect the visitor to another page (the exception is a page you’ve deleted for good - in which case you should use a “301 redirect”, a permanent redirect which is acceptable to search engines).

Your important content is in plain text and not contained in images. Search engine spiders can’t “read” content in JPEG, GIF, or PNG files. If you really feel that using an image rather than text is crucial to your design, at least put the same text in the image’s “Alt” tag (or in the “title” tag if you’re using the image as a hyperlink).

Your important content is not contained in Flash files. Flash is a wonderful technology, but unfortunately spiders don’t have the required “plugin” to view Flash files. As a result, Flash content is mostly inaccessible to search engine spiders. Some can find and follow hyperlinks within the Flash file, but unless those links lead to pages with readable HTML content this won’t help you much. Don’t create all-Flash pages for any content you want to get indexed - instead, put that content in the HTML portion of the page.

Links and keywords are not hidden inside JavaScript code. If your links use JavaScript to direct the user to the appropriate page (for instance, a drop-down list) or important content is contained within JavaScript code (when it’s displayed dynamically using DHTML, for instance) search engine spiders won’t be able to “see” it. You can, however, use the “noscript” HTML tags to provide an alternative that can be read by spiders.

You’ve optimized every important page of your website individually. Don’t stop at your home page. Take the trouble to optimize any page which has a reasonable chance of being indexed by the major search engines, targeting appropriate keywords for each. If you face a lot of competition it may be nearly impossible to get a top ranking for your home page, but you can still get a lot of search engine traffic to your site from other pages which are focused on very specific keyword phrases.

You didn’t duplicate content. Each page of your site should have unique content that distinguishes it from every other page on your site. Duplicating content or having pages that are only slightly different might be seen as “search engine spamming” (trying to manipulate search engine results).

You provide linking instructions for those who want to link to your site. Somewhere on your site state your policies about other people linking to your site and provide the wording you’d like them to use in their link. You want to encourage other people to link to your site, preferably using link text and a description that reflect the keywords for that page. For their convenience provide the ready-made HTML code for the link - not everyone will use it, but most often they will use your preferred text as a courtesy as long as it is truly descriptive of your site and doesn’t contain “marketing hype”.

You provide linking instructions for those who want to link to your site. Somewhere on your site state your policies about other people linking to your site and provide the wording you’d like them to use in their link. You want to encourage other people to link to your site, preferably using link text and a description that reflect the keywords for that page. For their convenience provide the ready-made HTML code for the link - not everyone will use it, but many will use your preferred text as a courtesy as long as it doesn’t contain “marketing hype”.

Important hyperlinks are plain text links and not image links or image maps. Text links are better from an SEO standpoint than image links, as spiders can’t read text from an image file. If you feel you really must use a graphic as a link, at least include a text description which (including the relevant keywords) by using the “title” attribute of the link tag.

Your website is free of coding errors and broken links. HTML coding errors and non-working links can keep search engine spiders from correctly reading and indexing your pages. For that reason, it’s a good idea to use a Web page validation utility to check your HTML code to make sure it’s error-free.

]]> http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?feed=rss2&p=47 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=51 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=51#comments Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:25:44 +0000 admin http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=51 So you have completed your web site, so what now?

Here are some steps to take to get your web site listed in Search Engines

1. Your first page is where search engines will start, make sure that this page is fully optimised will be the first place to start. What’s optimisation your ask? It’s making your site as search engine friendly as possible. You will also see people refer to this in the short form of SEO.

Your first step is the TITLE TAG. This is one item that search engines look for to start getting information about what your site is about. It is also what search engines will show above a clickable line on their results page. It is also a major consideration of where you will rank when certain inquiries are made of the search engine. TITLE TAGS are one of the major things to concentrate on and to make sure that you get it right. Doing so will result in not only better placement in the search engine, but enticing descriptions will also result in more people clicking on your link and visiting your site.

2. Putting keyword phrases into your pages - Finding the perfect set of keywords for your web pages and knowing the right keywords to use is very important because your site should provide people with what they are looking for. A free program to help you can be found at: http://www.goodkeywords.com, Good Keywords makes use of various tools provided by search engines like Yahoo, Google and other services like Alexa. Using Good Keywords makes it all very simple, fast and straight forward. Just remember…don’t over do it or you will be penalized.

3. Writing your web page copy - Your next step is to incorporate those keywords into the copy on your web site. This is extremely important as search engines need to see these keywords on your page so they can then analyze these words and decide where your site should be listed in their categories. Write your content around the keywords and repeat them throughout your content however make sure your content makes sense and dont over do it otherwise the search engine will ignore your content or not rank it as highly.

4. META TAGS - Meta tags provide search engines with information about the content and purpose of a Web site. A Web site that uses meta tags to the best of their ability will appear more often in search results and will also be seen closer to the top on those search results. Many people feel that stuffing keywords into the meta tags will help improve their rankings. The original idea behind meta tags was to give a way to classify the web site. The problem is that people abused this so now the search engines don’t consider meta tags to be as relevant to the ranking, therefore they give them less weight overall because of the keyword stuffing techniques used. That’s not to say that you still shouldn’t use meta tags, just consider to use them for what they were originally intended - that is to give your site an accurate title and description with a few keywords (3 or 4 phrases max) outlining what the page, or site is about.

5. ALT TAGS - The ALT tag or ‘alternative text’ is an attribute of the IMG tag. (Any graphic on your web site) An ALT tag should be included for every image within your web site. The ALT tag provides an alternate message to your viewers who can’t see your graphics. Without ALT tags, images on a web site are meaningless to these users. If you will be using a graphic menu systems for navigation, these alternate messages are an especially important aid to users without the ability to see your graphics. Adding an appropriate ALT tag to every image within your web site will make a huge difference to the accessibility of your web site. Also, for those who use Yahoo and Google image searches, your ALT Tags can be very important and will help bring traffic to your site.

On the reverse side, ALT TAG stuffing, which is using the tags in an image to hide keywords will rarely help a site’s position. If you can insert a key phrase into the image description then by all means do so. Remember that Alt tags do usually count towards your overall keyword density so it’s better to have relevant keyword alt tags rather than something like “siteimage1.gif”.

6. Linking - with more search engines coming online every day, search engines are looking for ways to serve quality links to visitors. This is where linking to other sites and having them link to you becomes important to both you and the search engine. People who assume that the more inbound links to them will help them, are very wrong. This may have been true at one time but not today. Search engines need to give quality results. One way they have of rating your site is by the quality of inbound links to your site. Therefore sites that are closely related to your site and that link to you will help boost your popularity in search engines. With Google this is a huge issue in how you rank with them. Having a hundred links from all sorts of site may result in hurting your ranking and you may be viewed as a link farm.

7. Spiders - A search engine is a database that has been put together by spiders. Spiders scour the Internet going through pages and recording information available on web pages. Spiders then give the information to the database and the database feeds the results. Theoretically, the web site should show up in the search results the next time the engine updates. It is important that all links on your site be active. A dead link may prevent a spider from doing your entire site.

8. Robots Text file - Search engines will look in your root domain for a special file named “robots.txt” (http://www.google.com/robots.txt). The file tells the robot (spider) which files it may spider (download). This system is called, The Robots Exclusion Standard.

9. FLASH - This has to be one of the top mistakes a web site owner can do to hurt their search engine rangkings. Good content will win over flash every time and getting visitors to your site is what you are trying to accomplish. As Google and Yahoo has been working with Adobe to improve how the spiders can crawl flash files it is still best pratcie to have rich content pages that will get you the rankings you need. You may have to decide between getting a high ranking or having a “pretty” entry page. Remember that you goal is customers and sales. It might look great the first time you visit the site but when you have to go there over and over again it becomes very annoying not to mention that people on dialup must cringe when faced with such a page. They often give up because of the length of time it takes to load a flash file.

10. Don’t expect results overnight. It takes time to get your ranking up there, even with paid inclusion, which can never be ganranteed as the big players in the search engine world od not accept money for website inclusion not matter what people will telll you . You may start out with a low ranking when you are first listed but as you continue to optimize your site and build “relevant” links you will start to see a gradual climb. As you wait for your rise to the top, concentrate on building as many relevant links as possible. Beside increasing your ranking you will be surprised at the number of referrals that you will received from those linked pages.

]]> http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?feed=rss2&p=51 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=7 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=7#comments Thu, 09 Oct 2008 01:25:06 +0000 admin http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=7 Anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among SEO analists.
The main reason for this is because Flash is so essentially spider unfrendly; content that goes into a Flash-only site is becomes almost invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That is no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced that it is worknig with both Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

The SEO world has been waiting for announcement for long time, as Flash developers have been wishing for ways to make their content searchable for close to a decade. Adobe acknowledges this in its announcement, saying that although search engines are able to index static text and links within Flash SWF files, “[Rich Internet Applications] and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states - a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.”

This announcement may also result in some major usability changes (for the better) for Flash on the web. In a post on its Webmaster Central Blog, Google wrote that it can now index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, like that included in Flash gadgets, buttons, menus, entirely self-contained Flash web sites, “and everything in between.”

Google can now also follow URLs embedded within Flash files to add to the crawling pipeline. This new indexing technology does not, however, include FLV files (video files that are found on sites like YouTube) because those are generated as videos and don’t contain any text elements like an SWF file does.

Google says it’s able to do this by developing an algorithm that “explores Flash files in the same way that a person would,” by clicking buttons and manually going through Flash content. “Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed,” wrote the company.

“We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.” Of course, Google (and eventually Yahoo) won’t be able to index everything embedded within a Flash file - at least not yet. Anything that is image-related, including text that is embedded into images, will be invisible to the search engines for the time being. Google also noted that it can’t execute certain JavaScripts that may be embedded into a Flash file, and that while it indexes content that is contained in a separate HTML or XML file, it won’t be counted as part of the content in the Flash file. These are all issues that are being worked on, however, and are likely to change in the future.

Yahoo is also working with Adobe to index SWF files, but doesn’t appear to be as far along as Google just yet. One player that is noticeably missing is Microsoft, though. From Adobe’s announcement and the language used by Google, it appears as if each search engine has to work with Adobe to make this possible - meaning that Microsoft has either been excluded by Adobe for this round or has decided to voluntarily sit this one out. Either way, with searchable SWF files down, usability experts can now focus all of their attention on other Flash-related concerns, like blatant design perversion and excessive animation abuse.

What this means for SEOs?

Flash has often been a source of frustration for SEOs who argue that text should be in HTML, with Flash used for non-textual content, such as video illustrations. Can SEOs now remove the “review Flash implementation” line from their checklists? Probably not. However, it should be easier for SEOs to work with Flash-based sites going forward.

SEOs should keep in mind that these new algorithms don’t take into account any meta data or formatting markup in the Flash file and, for now, Google’s cache won’t show a representation of the extracted text so site owners can’t verify what is actually being crawled by viewing the cached copy. In addition, since Googlebot doesn’t execute most JavaScript, Google won’t crawl or index any Flash executed via JavaScript. Any external sources that the Flash file loads will be indexed separately, rather than as part of the Flash file. And as noted earlier, all non-textual content will remain uncrawled. This new Flash support covers all languages other than bidirectional ones (Hebrew and Arabic) and all versions of Flash.

]]> http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?feed=rss2&p=7 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=5 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=5#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:41:04 +0000 admin http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=5 “It was on September 7, 1998 that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc.

There plan was to provide a better search engine. How did it look back then ? (click to see how it Google used to look). The design of Google has not changed much. Keeping things simple has been a major advantage and i believe is one of the reason of for there success

“It was on September 7, 1998 that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google Inc.

There plan was to provide a better search engine. How did it look back then ? (click to see how it Google used to look). The design of Google has not changed much. Keeping things simple has been a major advantage and i believe is one of the reason of for there success

Google had a relatively good search engine technology that succeeded in burying many of its late 1990s competitors, and on top of that it developed a successful advertising model and pledged to operate on a ‘don’t be evil’ philosophy.

The company now has around 20,000 employees and has a market value of about $150 billion, it also has been acquiring or developing a host of groundbreaking technologies. When did you start using its search engine?

So where to for google from here?, only time will tell.

]]> http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?feed=rss2&p=5 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=3 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=3#comments Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:21:59 +0000 admin http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=3 Google has kindly created a interesting interactive timeline of its last 10 year history.

The homepage prototype is interesting, showing how its simple design has not changed much in the past 10 years

Of course the is always the Google april fools jokes - first introduced in 2000

Click here to view Google’s 10 year history

]]> http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?feed=rss2&p=3 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=41 http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=41#comments Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:12:58 +0000 admin http://www.seo-services.co.nz/blog/?p=41 For META keyword tag, Google does ignore these so dont get to carried away here with your keywords, you will find most site now dont even bother adding META keywords .

For the META description tag, keep your most important keyword phrase near the beginning of the sentence and make this tag a full sentence and a flowing sentence, do not keyword stuff!.

Do bold keyword phrases in the first sentence on the page.

Use your keyword phrases in your headings, (H1, H2 and H3).

Use keywords in ALT tags.

When you are linking from any page back to your home page, use your most important keyword phrase in the link. When your home page is linking to any other page, use the keyword phrase in that link that the other page is being optimized for.

Don’t plan on getting much (if any) help by putting keywords or keyword phrases in your left Nav panel. Google likes keywords in full sentences. Putting the sentence in a paragraph is even better. Google classes a sentence as three or more words starting with a capital letter and ending with a period or other punctuation. Stop words such as:“I,” “a,” “the,” and “of” do NOT count as one of your three words.

Follow these rules and your Web site will make a big jump in its relevancy for your keyword phrases.

To be #1 or even in the top 10 on the search engines your relevance for a given keyword phrase is much more important than your PageRank.

For example, you could have a PageRank of 10 and still not show up in the top 100 sites when someone is searching for “peanut butter sandwiches” unless of course, your page is optimised for (and has a high relevance for) the phrase “peanut butter sandwiches.”

Use your keyword phrase in an H1, H2 or H3 headline followed by a keyword-rich paragraph and then repeat this with another H1, H2 or H3 headline and another keyword-rich paragraph. And of course repeat this again.

Don’t try to optimise a page for more that two or three keyword phrases and always optimize for keyword phrases and NOT keywords. After all, the keyword is included within the keyword phrase. Most people don’t search for just one word any more anyway.

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