Search Engine Optimization

From: BusinessMBA.org

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Interesting video on how Google determines to make improvements to its search algorithm.

Some Google Facts on Google Algorithms:

• Google has made over 500 changes to their search algorithms last year (as Amit Signhal) suggests that equates to nearly two per day.
• Each potential change is analyzed deeply to try and ensure that it is the right thing for users
• The first step with improving Google's algorithm always starts with an idea which may be based on "motivating searches"
• Key ranking engineers look at what signals or data could be integrated into their algorithm to address issues
• All ideas are tested through scientific testing
• Google has external people that have been trained to judge whether one ranking is more relevant or higher quality than another by looking at side-by-side sets of results; they use the "Google Sandbox" to test this out on live users as well.
• All data is rolled up and further looked at by a search analyst in 2010, Google ran over 20,000 different experiments
• Google conducts launch decision meetings where the leadership of the search team further evaluates the data and makes a decision
• Google focuses on whether these changes will help users just in the US or based in other various geographic locations
  
   

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Getting listed on Baidu's Search Engine is great if you're looking for visibility in China.  That's a billion people of extra visibility!

Here are some tips for getting on Baidu:

• Don’t talk about s(e)x or you’ll be out
• Don’t attack the Chinese government
  Baidu actively censors content in line with Chinese government regulations, so be very careful with what you put on your site.
• Use Chinese in your website (but don’t mix several languages on the same page – that's a general statement, not only for chinese)
• Use a .cn / .org.cn / or .com.cn domain name. Baidu loves China and shows it in its search engine response pages rankings.
• Host your website in China. Baidu prefers Chinese IP’s.
  With Google, you can host your site anywhere and then set each subdomain’s location using the Geotargeting tool to specify which region it’s relevant to. Baidu doesn’t appear to offer the same, so your best bet is to buy a Chinese top level domain and host it on a server in China.
• Have many links. Baidu prefers quantity over quality.
• Don’t try to have a pagerank 6 or above links like you would do for google. Just have thousands of backlinks.
• Add fresh content; like Google, Baidu likes fresh content.
• Don’t use ISO-8885-1 coding in your pages but UTF-8 or GB2312 (well, UTF-8 is better because it suits any language around the globe)
• By ads on baidu!

提交网站到百度
Submit your URL to Baidu, China's #1 Search Engine
Submit your URL to Baidu

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Google, Yahoo, or MSN may append DMOZ title and description

Getting your website listed on DMOZ will give it a boost in ranking in Google and other search engines due to DMOZ's historic value and credibility by being publicly edited, like Wikipedia.  In some circumstances, Google may append the title or description you are listed under in DMOZ in your search engine results.  This will affect your site's SEO by making results less relevant to the actual content of the page and could push your site down.  For example, in the picture below, "Galido Network Consulting" skews the actual title content and makes it less relevant to the actual content being searched.


To work around this, and to prevent "Galido Network Consulting" from being displayed, use the following meta tags:

If you only have the problem with Google, you can use this:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noodp"></meta>
If you have the problem with Yahoo!, you can use this:

<meta name="slurp" content="noydir"></meta>
If you have the problem with MSN, you can use this:

<meta name="msnbot" content="noodp"></meta>

You can also use a single robots meta tag with multiple attributes separated by commas like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir"></meta>

Here's another site that allows you to submit your site to search engines for FREE! SubmitStart allows you to submit an unlimited number of web pages to the leading search engines online for Free! Just enter your site and email address below and click on "Submit" to start!

Great explanation on Trackback link exchanges:

1. Force Caching with htaccess

Use: The following htaccess code won’t help the initial pageload, but it will significantly help subsequent pageloads by sending 304 status when requested elements haven’t been modified.

FileETag MTime Size
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault “access plus x seconds”

I generally set the cache for one day (86400 seconds). You can also set different expirations for each file type by breaking each file type up into separate ExpiresByType lines such as:

ExpiresByType image/gif “access plus x seconds”
ExpiresByType text/css “access plus x seconds”


2. Set a Custom 404 Page with htaccess

Use: I think this one is self explantatory. Just change ‘/notfound.html’ to match the path to your custom 404 page.

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html


3. Implement a 301 Redirect with htaccess

Use: If you have permanently changed the URL structure on your site (via either optimization change or CMS migration), you will want to implement 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL.

The syntax for a basic 301 redirect is:

Redirect 301 relative/path/to/oldurl/ http://www.domain.com/newurl/

Explanation:
The first URL should be a relative path to the old URL and the second one should be an absolute path to the new URL.


4. Only allow specific IP addresses in certain directories

This is especially useful for admin directories. I generally set my home IP and work IP as the only allowable IPs who can even attempt a login. Unlike other .htaccess hacks, this one doesn’t work from the root folder. You will need to create a new .htaccess file, put the following code in it, and upload it to your admin directory.

AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName “Example Access Control”
AuthType Basic

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from xx.xx.xx.xx

To allow a second IP, just add another ‘allow from’ line.


5. Prevent Image Hot Linking with htaccess
Source: Link Building Secrets Revealed

Basically, you should set up your server to rewrite all of your images to a script. The script will control where the user is coming from, and act accordingly: it will show to users coming from image searches the landing page showing the image they've found, and will continue to serve to regular users the image as usual.

If your server runs Apache with PHP and you can use the .htaccess file, you may set it up like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (.*)\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) /script.php?imgpath=$1 [PT]
This will tell to your web server to rewrite any URL that ends with a dot which is followed by "jpg", "jpeg", "gif", "png" or "bmp" (case insensitive) to your script "script.php" on your domain root, passing the entire REQUEST_URI as the "imgpath" parameter in the querystring.

Then, in script.php you will check the HTTP REFERER value, and if you find that it contains "images.google.com" (or any other image search engine you may want to include), the script will serve the landing page. In any other case, the image will be shown as usual.


6. Enable gzip with htaccess

Gzip is a means of compressing the files on your server so they will load faster. To enable gzip, just

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml application/xhtml+xml text/javascript text/css application/x-javascript
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html


7. Remove ‘category’ from a URL with htaccess

Many content management sytems use the ‘category’ URL segment. For instance:

http://makeitrank.com/category/category-name

Well, that’s fine, and it’s necessary to make the CMS work the way it’s supposed to, but it doesn’t need to be visible to do its job. Just drop the following code into your htaccess file to get rid of it.

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]


8. Define any page as the home page with htaccess

You can set any page as the homepage by adding the following to the htaccess file in your root directory.

DirectoryIndex myfile


9. Disable Directory Browsing

You want to keep people out of any directories that might reveal security weaknesses — for instance, plugin directories.

You can block vistors from browsing the directories by adding the following line to the htaccess file in the directory you’d like to block:

Options All -Indexes


10. Protect your htaccess file

Lastly, you want to protect your htaccess file. Hopefully your host has protected it for you, but you can’t be too safe with these things. The following hack will prevent anybody from accessing your htaccess:

<files .htaccess>

order allow,deny
deny from all

</files>

Source: 10 htaccess Hacks Every SEO Should Know  

From Google Blog:

"Finding more high-quality sites in search"

Our goal is simple: to give people the most relevant answers to their queries as quickly as possible. This requires constant tuning of our algorithms, as new content—both good and bad—comes online all the time.

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.

We can’t make a major improvement without affecting rankings for many sites. It has to be that some sites will go up and some will go down. Google depends on the high quality content created by wonderful websites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem. Therefore, it is important for high quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.

It’s worth noting that this update does not rely on the feedback we’ve received from the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension, which we launched last week. However, we did compare the Blocklist data we gathered with the sites identified by our algorithm, and we were very pleased that the preferences our users expressed by using the extension are well represented. If you take the top several dozen or so most-blocked domains from the Chrome extension, then this algorithmic change addresses 84% of them, which is strong independent confirmation of the user benefits.

So, we’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results. We’ve been tackling these issues for more than a year, and working on this specific change for the past few months. And we’re working on many more updates that we believe will substantially improve the quality of the pages in our results.

To start with, we’re launching this change in the U.S. only; we plan to roll it out elsewhere over time. We’ll keep you posted as we roll this and other changes out, and as always please keep giving us feedback about the quality of our results because it really helps us to improve Google Search.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer

Read more: Business Insider

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Google Global
Google Global, Developed by Redfly LTD (Redfly Marketing) is an extension that allows you to see how Google search results appear in different countries, regions and cities. Google global has default countries set and allows you to add customized locations so you can see how search results appear in the exact location that you require. Excellent for SEO/Marketing companies who work with clients in different regions.

Chrome SEO
The Google Chrome SEO Extension provides easy access to Search Engine Optimization Tools that can help you with Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Checks, PageRank Checks and other daily SEO tasks.

SEOmoz SEO Toolbar for Chrome
SEOmoz has rebuilt its popular Firefox toolbar as an extension for Chrome!
SEO Toolbar Highlights
- Easy access to SEOmoz link metrics while you surf the web
- An analyze Page overlay, exposing metrics and page elements
- A SERP overlay with detailed link metrics
- Simple highlighting of nofollowed links.
- Quick access to powerful tools.
- Ability to display the toolbar at the top or bottom of the page

View Linkscape Metrics Right on the Toolbar
- Page Authority and Domain Authority.
- mozRank™ (mR) and mozTrust™ (mT) for every URL that you visit.
- Domain mozRank™ (DmR) and Domain mozTrust™ (DmT) too!
- The number of URLs and domains linking to the page.

SEO Site Tools
Seen on http://j.mp/searchenginejournal as "The SEO Tool That May Make You Switch to Google Chrome" and http://j.mp/SeoMoz this tool is the most comprehensive SEO Tool on any browser... not only does it pull more metircs from more sources, including social media reactions, it also enhances common tools like Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster tools with links anchor text and pagerank.Even nofollow link hilighting, popout ability, color themes, even more below... also http://j.mp/SiteToolsPrivacy

SEO Status Pagerank/Alexa Toolbar
The SEO Status PageRank / Alexa Toolbar is:
* Simple
* Light-weight
* Very fast
* Will improve Alexa rank for visited sites
It shows the PR and Alexa rank for every website visited right on the button itself.
Unlike other popular extensions that bog down the Chrome browser, the SEO Status Toolbar is the fastest and most light-weight Page Rank extension that I've seen. It was written to be lightening fast and very simple. It WILL NOT slow down the loading of a website as it calculates the data on a seperate thread from the main browser. The PageRank and Alexa rank do not rely on a third-party website to gather its data, but retrieves it from Google and Alexa directly. When the button is clicked, it shows more data such as an Alexa traffic graph, ranking number, and useful tools for the avid webmaster.

SEOQuake
Displays the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and other SEO parameters of any webpage, highlights nofollow links, text density, check and compare urls.

Site Geo IP Locator
If you click the icon in the a tab that opened a web page, it shows the IP address of current web site, locate the IP geolocation on the map. If you click the icon in a blank tab, it shows your current IP address. This extension is great for SEO research and web developers.

SitezMeter
Shows the PageRank of webpages you are browing. Plus SitezMeter displays traffic charts from Google Trends, Alexa and Compete. This handy SEO tool shows you the Google PageRank of webpages beside the address box. The PageRank value is cached locally, so it doesn't have to hit the server every time you switch tab. Moreover, click the icon in the popup window provides extensive information about web sites traffic - instantly find out how popular a web site is, its rank, and how fast it is growing. Please check out the screen shot for more detail.

Chrome Flags
The extension displays a country flag indicating the physical location of the websites you're visiting. The extension also provides access to detailed information regarding the website's servers, owners, traffic and trustworthiness.