SEO Moves Blog - Search Engine Optimisation » Search Engines

A look at SEO in 2011

John — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 01:40:06 +0000

What does it mean to rank #1 on the major search engines in 2010 and beyond? Is it as important as being the “big dog” a few years ago? Or, as some believe, is it not quite as important as in the past?

Not too long ago, Wired magazine ran an article by Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff entitled “The Web is Dead, Long Live the Internet.” In the introduction to that article the authors write, “Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services – think apps – are less about the searching and more about the getting.”

If this is true, finding your way to the top of the search engines won’t be quite so crucial, in terms of business success. The authors note that people may spend their entire day on the Internet and never really search the Web. Specific apps for email, social sites, news and business resources make it unnecessary to type and search.

Anderson and Wolff urge the skeptics among us not to toss this off as “a trivial distinction.” They call the new model “semi-closed platforms” that use the Internet as a transportation device. But there is no basic need for a browser to display pages. The bottom line is it’s “a world Google can’t crawl.”

Learning The Ropes of SEO

John — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:50:00 +0000

The amount of SEO smarts you can pick up just by taking advantage of free tutorials and articles is astounding. Sure, going to an SEO course in San Diego when it’s winter in Minnesota is going to sound very tempting, but if you or your company are on a tight budget (and who isn’t?) it makes sense to squeeze every bit of knowledge you can about SEO from what is readily available online. Five good sites to start with are:

If you take the time to print out the materials or otherwise pore over them with attention, you’re going to come away knowing far more about SEO than you do now, and all it will cost you is your time. There is a lot to be said for SEO self-education, particularly since there is so much information available for free out there. And once you’ve read it and inwardly digested the information, if you still decide to go to that paid SEO seminar, you’re going to be able to ask some really pointed, educated questions and learn even more than if you were going into it as a novice. Don’t wait for your competitor to soak up the knowledge first: make it your goal today to learn at least three new things about SEO.

How Googlebot Views Your Site

John — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:11:04 +0000

Robert Burns was right when he said, “O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.” He probably wasn’t thinking about search engine robots when he wrote it, but it certainly applies. If you don’t know how the major search engine robots (like Googlebot) “see” your website, then you may be in the dark when you’re trying to make changes to bring up your standings in the search engine results.

Fortunately, Google Webmaster Tools has a “Fetch as Googlebot” tool. On the Webmaster Tools dashboard, click on the “+” sign by the “Labs” link in the left hand column. When you do, you’ll see an option called “Fetch as Googlebot” as you can see in the first screen shot. Click on it, and it will download your site as the Googlebot sees it. (The tool is still buggy when it comes to interpreting PDF files, however.)

The second screen shot shows just a small part of what it sees. Even if you don’t know much about html, if you read through your results you can at least see if important parts of your site are making it into Googlebot’s “view” of your site. The main problems the Googlebot has is with Flash graphics, but there are workarounds for this.

Bing – SEO Efforts Targeted to Bing

John — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 03:19:07 +0000

When it comes to search engine optimization, the do’s and don’ts with Bing are just about the same as they are with other search engines: have awesome, original content, use sitemaps, and earn high quality inbound links. In other words, you don’t have to start doing everything differently. And solid SEO practices will not only help you in Bing, but in the other major search engines as well.

You can submit your web address to Bing to be indexed. Now, chances are, if you follow the Bing guidelines, you don’t really need to send your URL to Bing for indexing, but for those who have a “belt and suspenders” approach, it is fine to do so by going to http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx. As you can see from the screen shot, it’s a simple process.

While submitting your website doesn’t definitely mean it will be indexed, it will help them locate it so that the MSNBot can crawl it (or try to). The bot doesn’t automatically crawl sub-folder pages on your site, so if you want the bot to index specific pages, submit their URLs to Bing as well. The exception is if a sub-folder page is linked to from other sites, the bot might automatically crawl it.