The web log’s abbreviated form is known as a Blog. With the popularity graph of internet and web based services rising day by day, The Blog has become the most familiar and popular term among internet users around the globe.

Usually websites which maintains information in a chronological order is called a Blog. A Blog carries diary type information that is frequently updated. The topics for Blogs can range from personal to political. It may focus on a single subject or can handle a variety of subjects in different domains. The participatory aspect of the blog is the unique selling point of it.

A Blogging site contains articles on a specific topics or variety of topics which are listed in a chronological order, with the newly updated article appearing first. An archive of previous articles can also be saved for future reference. A facility for the user to post his comments on a particular article is also provided. This makes the blog more of an interactive place where ideas are exchanged and comments are made which results in the general improvement of the site.

As the marketing businesses around the globe focus on the internet with aggressive marketing strategies, blogging sites have gained much importance than ever. Online marketing proves out to be successful when your optimised document gets indexed and ranked by a popular search engine.

This can drive huge traffic to your website and there by increasing its popularity. As a channel for cost effective marketing, a blog can be used within the overall Online marketing mix. If optimisation of content is taken seriously, huge benefits can be reaped from it. If the content is categorized according to themes, it makes your content understandable for the search engine. Meansing you will have a better chance of getting high ranks on the specified topics.

Providing an uncomplicated URL makes good way for search engine spiders to notice your content. Compared to websites, blog provides more free links to other sites. Any form of media, audio, video, images or text files can be made easily be posted in a blog. The presence of this kind of media can attract a huge number of incoming links. Traffic rates can be increased using RSS feeds. Among all these, the only thing which can make your website stand out in the crowd is fresh content. Yes, fresh content can force search engines to pay more visits to your sites. Providing fresh content can result in incremental increase in site traffic too.

Besides all the above mentioned advantages, the blog is very much vulnerable to spams. Spam Blog, popularly known as ’splogs’ capitalize on the network communication features like low cost, easy accessibility and flexibility. As part of the get-rich-quick schemes, slpogger make use of splogs to make money by getting the user to click on the ads displayed on the site. The slpogger gets paid every time someone clicks the ad. Using these methods for increasing traffic to your site may drive you into deep trouble.

How important is it to have a good domain name? and what effects does google put on extensively long domains or new domains.

Right in this post i am going to use a customer of First Search SEO as an example.

Our client has a less than 6 month old domain name and currently comes up for very little of the ‘Key Phrases’ that we have optimised the site to appear for. Now we think they may be many reasons that the site may not be working and a couple are relevant to the domain name.

Issues concerning the domain and are as follows:

• The domain has been ’sand boxed’ due to being a young domain and is trying to compete with older more established domains.
• The second idea is that the domain name is too long.

Now both these ideas are grey areas in search engine optimisation and no-ones sure whether domains can actually get sand boxed etc.

 Young Domains?

If the domain is new, i personally do not see the problem this would have when listing with search engines as i do not think this would matter and the results of this theory of often inconsistant. At First Search SEO we have seen both new domains do well and badly as in this case.

Long Domains?

Now we all know that the search engines rate domain names highly in terms of importance, is there a restriction of this? as if i have a specific search result i wish to come up for i could buy that exact domain.

for example:

Wood floor lining cornwall

so i could buy : www.woodfloorliningcornwall.co.uk

Also i have seen this happening across the world of SEM and am now wondering if the search engines have picked up on it and are penalizing extremely long domains?

The customer in question:

Absence Management - www.absencemanagementlimited.com

If you have any Questions or would like to answer any of our posts please visit our forum!

Search Engine Optimisation Forum 

Web 2.0 has had many success stories as the integration between web content and user interaction becomes evermore seamless. However, the most popular of this new series of web technologies is blogging – a means whereby users can post articles and opinions on any topic of their choosing on their own web space. The result of this is an online community where posters and readers can post comments, and more importantly, hyperlinks. As a SEO strategy, this can be a very effective method of communicating not only the existence, but the significance of your website in the industry, especially if corresponding blog posts speak favourably of your site. The major benefit is that blogs can reach very wide audiences if implemented and promoted correctly.

Imagine a situation where everytime you had an idea to share, 5,000 people who trust your opinions see it in your blog. The majority of those 5,000 people also write blogs in your field or related fields. Some of those bloggers may frequently mention your site on their blogs, and they themselves could have thousands of subscribers. Within a short space of time your blog could have the attention of hundreds or even thousands of users. Where people go search engines follow, so if many users link to your blog, it will also boost the search engine ranking for other parts of your site.

It is important however that your blog postings avoid ‘commodity status’, which includes short comments on somebody else’s work, and simply posting for the sake of generating optimised keywords. Posts must maintain quality, originality, depth and have its content driven by the user’s expertise in order to acquire popularity amongst web communities. I have studied in-depth, the work of usability expert Jakob Nielsen, and I have found an interesting article of his; Write Articles, Not Blog Postings, which encapsulates this matter perfectly. He asserts that leadership (or prevalence of the poster’s expertise) in blog postings, blog-post variability and regularity are of high priority in gaining trust and recognition. I believe he wants to encourage you to personalise your posts, by giving your own opinions and judgements on your subjects to provoke interest and even raise debate.

He also points out however, that if the content isn’t the main concern for your site, and you simply want to communicate simple answers to your user’s questions then “you should comply with the bulk of content usability guidelines: be as brief as you can; use bulleted lists and highlighted keywords; chunk the material; and use descriptive headings, subheads, and hyperlinks.” These guidelines all fall nicely into the standard Search Engine Optimisation requirements. I believe it is therefore essential that blog postings for SEO manage to achieve a balance where expertise and content usability can work together simultaneously to bring the right users to your site.

One of the chief objectives of Web 2.0 and web logging is to make the Internet a more community-based entity, and by using the blogging practice in the most effective way for your website, you can take advantage of this. This doesn’t just mean writing articles on your chosen topic and leaving it there, but it means interacting with the wider community. Quoting and linking to other popular bloggers, leaving useful comments on other related blogs, writing articles for other blogs and actively soliciting & replying to comments can really push users towards your blog.

With RSS feeds also enhancing the likeliness of your articles being noticed and linked to, it will only improve your website’s probability of being picked up by Search Engines, making blog posting a valuable resource for optimisation.

Reference:

Wall, A M (2007). Search Engine Optimisation Book. California: Aaron Matthew Wall. 87-91.

Jakob Nielsen (2007) Write Articles, Not Blog Postings [online] available from <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/articles-not-blogs.html> [15 January. 2007]

You may be asking yourself, as we have been here at First Search SEO, ‘why does my site rank brilliantly one week then not the next?’

Continually updating your site content may be recommended to a lot of web masters, this may be so if done a certain way. For example, from the experience of the search engine optimisers at First Search SEO, we have found that Google disagrees with the constant changing of optimised key phrases.

The best way to constantly update your site is through a content managed news systems or a RSS feed, these can still cause problems, as if you have script re-calling the articles and the titles are or aren’t key word rich to your chosen optimisation, this can also effect you Google standings.

The name “Google Dance” has often been used to describe the index update of the Google search engine. Google’s index update occurred on average once per month. This have now changed and Google crawls the web constantly for updates, but does this still have a similar effect as the previous method?
Google’s search engine pulls results from more than 10,000 dedicated servers, now it’s not possible to update the index on these servers at the same time, so one by one they will be updated.
Now does this explain the reason why an unchanged site can drop severely in Google’s rankings or even disappear all together?
Could the search specific to your site be determined by which Google server your search is being processed by this week or month? Maybe, and it would explain these strange behaviors shown by standings.
This week my site has been cached by a Google server that has yet to be updated with the backward links obtained and the newly gained importance of the site, meaning that my site have gone from being top 40 to the bottom end of 200?
If this is true, then only time will allow us at First Search SEO to determine the time scale that this happens over and whether the site in question returns to its rightful place once all the servers have been updated.
Search Engine Optimisation and Marketing from First Search SEO.

You may be asking yourself, why do i position well in yahoo and msn, but not in Google?

Well your probably getting penalized for something that you have implemented into the search engine marketing of your site. Different search engine use different algorithms and each search engine weighs different parts of a site differently.

• Google are the primary UK & US search engine, Google focuses on the sites age and link based authority and popularity, they are the industry leaders and seem to have the best system for determining the Good sites from the poor sites, spammers and aggressive optimisers.
• Yahoo! focuses more on the page content side of thing, but while still relying on a large decent link base.
• MSN is easier to manipulate, by using low-quality links, aggressive anchor text and high population of keywords, getting a higher position becomes more possible.

Tweaking a pages internal optimization is very time consuming and the effect is mostly un-noticeable once a decent standard has been set, your better off trying to research quality links that have value and are from a industry site related to you.

Google now offers a page rank measuring tool built into their free downloadable tool bar, available for all popular browsers.

The Google Page Rank tool, provides a logarithmic scale to mimic the link popularity of pages and websites themselves. By looking at a page rank you can automatically see how important Google rates the web site or web page. First Search SEO currently has a page rank of 3/10, but with constant link building this will rise and is almost certainly a 4 now. (just awaiting Google to re-score the web sites - this usually happens 4 times a year, but this is not set into stone.)

Google would like you to believe that their Page Rank system is the core of their search engine optimisation system, this is simply not true and there are many other factors which improve the returned results which Google supplies.

Many webmasters and developers exchange links with as many sites as possible, but this isn’t necessarily the right thing to do. As you can image there are good links and bad links, which are available to exchange with on the web. Google has the intelligence to sort the good from the bad, this increases the risk of swapping and adding links to every site possible.

“When you link to the wrong circles, you run the risk of being associated with them”
Aaron Mathew Wall, (http://www.theseobook.com)

Google’s page rank is only a single component of the Google search engine algorithm. A better optimised site with a lower page rank will feature above a competitor with a higher page rank in the results of a keyword search in Google.

Search Engine Optimisation tips and Implementation from First Search SEO

A common question we get is can you only optimise the Home page of a website. I can understand why people think this as the Home page is the most important page of the site but the answer is YES you can and should optimise the other pages of a website.

When you are optimising the other pages of a website you should remember:

- You should use text based navigation.

- If you use graphics then remember to use the ALT tag.

- Use a site map to allow google to spider your whole site.

- Deep link to related articles and content from within the articles and content of your page copy.

- Use CSS.

We at First Search SEO apply this to all our optimised sites.

In the natural or organic search engine optimisation listing within Google, you sometimes see Google displaying several links to pages within a site underneath the main link. It is difficult publish this in a listing within the search engine, as google has an automated algorithum which controls the functionality.

Usually it is aimed towards the larger of web sites and usually appears in relation to searches that involve a company name (your company) or specific pages from a web site other than the homepage. Rumor has it backward links containing the company name and therefore attracting a lot of visitors via Google is a main reason that Google applies these to your listing. Most probably Google will have a threshold for the amount of keyword rich links you need before supplying your site with a ’sitelink’.

The sitelinks can be taken from any area within your site and Google does not restrict this to your main navigation, The speculation behind the theory of ’sitelinks’ within the search engine optimisation listings is that it is directly related to the highest search phrase volume on a site.

The algorithim that Google uses to position sites for keyphrases has changed (as it always is).

The most recent change is to devalue a link from a website that is a paid link.

We at First Search SEO keep abreast of all changes to the Google Algorithm and can rest assured we have taken the appropriate action regarding this.

Many people often wonder why all credible Search Engine Optimisation companies charge on going fees, I mean what else is there to do once the sites position has been achieved for its keyphrases?

The answer of course is that it takes a lot of effort to get a site listed for a competitive key phrase and just as much effort keeping it there.  Not many non optimisers are aware that Google continually changes its algorithms and that it is continually revaluating a sites relevancy and trustworthiness to appear for the phrase it has been optimised for.  In short a lot of work has to be done to keep a site listed for its key phrases. The thing most people don’t understand is that that most work that is done to keep a site listed in Google can not be seen within the site.  Without the skills of an optimisation company no site will keep it’s position for long if it just has a one off effort for optimisation and is why ongoing optimisation fees pay dividends in the long run.

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed.^[1] The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase “search engine optimization” was a spam message posted on Usenet on July 26, 1997.^[2]

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta-tags provided a guide to each page’s content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, because some webmasters abused meta tags by including irrelevant keywords to artificially increase page impressions for their website and to increase their ad revenue. Cost per thousand impressions was at the time the common means of monetizing content websites. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent meta data in meta tags caused pages to rank for irrelevant searches, and fail to rank for relevant searches.^[3] Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.^[4]

By relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

While graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed “backrub”, a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links.^[5] PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design.^[6] Off-page factors such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis were considered, as well as on-page factors, to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaining PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.^[7]

To reduce the impact of link schemes, as of 2007, search engines consider a wide range of undisclosed factors for their ranking algorithms. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.^[8] The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.^[9][10] SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove their listings.

The initialism “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers”, a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

First Search SEO, Search Engine Marketing experts