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Google launches its own Sitemap Generator (Beta)!

admin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 03:56:02 +0000

Open source XML sitemap generator tool announced by Google. Google had built its own sitemap generator with more controls and its search engine friendly. It performs the same thing as the some other software’s do that are available in the market, the only difference is that it’s free and Google has developed it.

Google described it as:

Google Sitemap Generator is a tool installed on your web server to generate the Sitemaps automatically. Unlike many other third party Sitemap generation tools, Google Sitemap Generator takes a different approach: it will monitor your web server traffic, and detect updates to your website automatically.

According to me everyone needs a sitemap generating tool, and since it is developed by Google I will definitely try it. I will try it and post my feedback later.

You can download its copy from here

White Hat Vs Black Hat

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:57:22 +0000

As with any other business practice, Search Engine Optimization can be performed within or without the boundaries of accepted business ethics. White hat SEO is optimization that follows the guidelines set forth by search engines. Black hat SEO intentionally undermines these guidelines.

For those who haven’t heard, for the past year or two some have labeled different forms of search engine optimization by different hat colors. Those who practice what some refer to as “ethical” SEO are the White Hats (like the good guys in the movies), and those who some refer to as “spammers” are the Black Hats (like the bad guys in the movies). Those who are not quite as pure as the driven snow but who aren’t quite as… umm… aggressive as a full-fledged “search engine spammer” are sometimes referred to as Gray Hats.

There are various new shades added to the list:

* Dark Inky Black Hat SEO: So evil he’s a typo squatter installing spyware. Plain illegal, too.

* Charcoal Hat SEO: Optimizes really unrelated pages for all kinds of queries, but within the bounds of legality.

* Dark Gray Hat SEO: This SEO is e.g. a splogger stealing content from other sites. (What, that’s better than charcoal?)

* Slate Gray Hat SEO: An SEO creating link farms and such.

* Gray Hat SEO: An SEO who actually reads the search engine’s webmaster guidelines, but then tries as much “evil” as she can get away with.

* Light Gray Hat SEO: This SEO creates original content (lots of it), but the content is still only aimed at search engines.

* Off-White Hat SEO: This guy not only ensures the site is indexable – he’ll also make sure to get lots of backlinks from friends.

* White Hat SEO: This person puts up the content that people are actually searching for, and prepares the site to make it very accessible. White Hat SEOs only optimize those of their pages they deem worthy to be ranking top in search engines.

* Luminescent Pearly White Hat SEO: Not only does this SEO do everything the White Hat SEO does, the LPW Hat SEO also makes sure pages will not show up for irrelevant queries.

But are these labels helping anyone, and do they really mean anything? Certainly, the SEO methods I use would put me into the White Hat category. Does this make me better than those in the Black Hat category? I guess the question would be, better at what? It doesn’t make me a better person, nor does it necessarily make me a better SEO. It might make me better at not getting a site banned from the search engines, but then again, most Black Hats know that their sites will eventually get banned and have figured that into their business model. So it’s not really a question of good or bad, like the hats seem to imply.

White hat SEO includes:

* Increasing keyword density within text in a relatively natural manner

* Designing keyword friendly Titles, Meta Tags, Meta Descriptions, Headers, and Alt text for your site

* Natural linking between your site and similar sites

* Developing new, link-friendly content for your site

Both White Hat and Black Hat SEOs have their place. Lots of people are indeed looking for the types of products and services that Black Hatters specialize in. There is a huge demand for their black magic. As much as I hate lousy search results, as long as the Black Hats are doing their thing to the types of sites that I wouldn’t be seeking out anyway, then it really doesn’t bother me; it’s the search engines’ problem to get rid of it.

The important thing to note, however, is that most sites don’t need to resort to Black Hat SEO.

There are definite advantages to cutting corners and utilizing black hat SEO, mainly that your page will increase dramatically in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank within a relatively brief amount of time. However, search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) are constantly updating their algorithms to detect and penalize black hat SEO.

Formerly, it was common practice in black hat SEO to create hidden text within web pages. This text increased keyword density without creating phony sounding text. For instance, if I wanted to increase my keyword density for copywriting I could simply insert the following line at the bottom of my text:

Then I could change the text font color to white and “presto” the text disappears — my keyword density for copywriting increases but my visible text remains the same.

It all depends on what the Website owner’s goal is. Do they want quick fixes and throwaway domains for the chance of a temporary big payoff, or do they want a stable business that takes a lot of time and energy, but which pays off handsomely over time? Neither one is necessarily right or wrong — just different. It’s just like the stock market or gambling in many ways. If you’re willing to be extremely aggressive, there’s a chance you’ll make a ton of money. However, there’s usually even more of a chance that you’ll lose a ton also. It really comes down to how much of a gambler you are.

Fortunately, this basic black hat practice is no longer viable, as search engines have developed methods to detect ‘keyword spam’ and same-color text. Websites with such black hat tactics are not only recognized by the search engines as black hat sites, but are penalized and often completely removed from SERPs. If this happens to your page, it can take months or years to regain your ranking.

Most current black hat SEO takes place on the design or programming side of website development. These tactics include:

* Cloaking — Showing a different page to search engines than to site visitors

* Duplicating content — creating numerous copies of web pages in order to increase page rank

* Link Farming — Buying into ‘link farms’, sites with no other intention than to increase your links unnaturally

* Page jacking — Copying and pasting text from other websites and using it as your own

fIs Black Hat SEO worth the Risk? In my mind, no. You may get away with it and it will be very lucrative for you to quickly climb the SERPs. However, keep in mind that competitors and Search Engines are extremely suspicious of quick-climbing websites. If your site is found to have black hat SEO, it will be severely penalized by if not completely removed from the search engine.

For a company looking for long-term success, there is absolutely no reason to gamble with their site. But seriously, even though it may take more lead-time, the White Hat method is a lot less stressful, and quite frankly a whole lot easier.

How to create a Google Site Map

admin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:22:31 +0000

Officially announced on June 6th, 2005 at Google’e Blog, Google Site Map allows you to submit a listing of all your urls for Google to crawl.

There have been many questions concerning the procedure of creating a Google Site Map. Below is the non-Python way of creating one. (Note: Google has further documentation at their site)

First, create a file named sitemap.xml

Use the following code in any HTML editor:

Here’s a breakdown of those properties:

lastmod -

This is the date the document was last modified and uses the following formats:

dd.mm.yyyy

dd.mm.yyyy hh:mm

dd/mm/yyyy

dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm

changefreq -

Tells Google Sitemaps the frequently that content of a particular URL will change.

Your options are “always”, “hourly”, “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”, “yearly” or “never”.

The value “always” should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value “never” should be used to describe archived URLs.

priority -

The priority of a particular URL relative to other pages on your site.
You may select between 0.0 and 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the lowest priority page(s) on your website and 1.0 identifies the highest priority page(s) on your website.

Add as many pages as there are in your website.

Google Sitemap supports up to 50,000 pages per XML file.

Once you’ve completed all of those steps, you’ll need to submit your site map page.

Submit to: (requires gmail account)

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

What is SEO

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:55:39 +0000

SEO- Search Engine Optimisation. Over the last ten years SE’s (Search Engines) have become an ever increasing important factor in business promotion. The four major SE’s generate in excess of 700 million search queries a day, an outstanding fact that really emphasises the importance of utilising the potential reach of the Search Engine.

Over 75% of people now use the internet when looking to buy a product or service. Websites in the top 3 pages of the major search engines gain 90% of search engine traffic. Basically, if you have a website you need to be on the first few pages of the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) to get the traffic.so how do you do this?………. Its not quite as simple as many people believe. I am constantly being asked ” I have just had a website built but do not appear on Google.” Well firstly type in the URL (web address) of your website, if you still do not come up then your site has not been indexed. If your website does appear then previously when you said “I do not appear in Google” what you meant is- you typed in a keyword (a word related to your product/service) and your website did not appear in the top few pages. To be honest, this is very unlikely to happen. Unless you are selling a very unique product with very little competition then your website is likely to be on page 23 or worse!

Everybody with a website would love to be #1 on google for their main keyword, but it takes time and effort. You need to optimise your website for the best chances of achieving this.

After crawling the internet using robots called “spiders”, the SE’s use a complex mathematical formula to “rank” websites on importance and relevance to certain keywords. These formulas are known as “algorithms”. SEO describes the techniques that use a knowledge of how SE’s rank websites, to make alterations to a site so that it better “adheres” to the “algorithms”.

There are to main phases to the optimisation process- “on page” and “off page”. On page is the alterations that are made to the physical content of a website and the code that makes up each webpage. This includes intergrating keywords into areas of the site that the SE’s deem important. Off page optimisation is the process of building links to a website…… what this means is getting as many websites to have a link somewhere on their site to the site you are optimising. This is very important because a major part of SE’s “algorithms” is link popularity- the more websites that link to another, the more important it is considered by the SE’s and the higher up it appears in the SERP’s.

Of course there are many more technical issues involved with Search Engine Optimisation but i wont discuss these in this article.. One thing that you should remeber though when thinking about SEO is that it certainly is not instant. Due to the way search engines work it may be several months before the friuts of your labour are seen, in the form of higher rankings.Google currently indexes over 8 billion web pages and the ever increasing size of the internet means that the SE’s certainly have their work cut out.

Many companies manage their own SEO in house, this can work fine but be willing to put in the time to learn the technicalities. The “nity gritty” of it can be slighly overwhelming as it is quite a specialist, technical field.

Beginners Guide

admin — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:58:03 +0000

Search Engine Optimisation is the buzzword around at the moment. It is the art of getting a website to appear higher up in the “natural” results pages of Search engines like “Google”. Although I highly recommended SEO for any business wanting to push online sales or increase website visibility it does have a few limitations:

Time frame:

Due to the nature of how search engines operate and the vast size of the Internet it may take several months before you “see the fruits of your labour” with SEO.

Cost:

SEO is a very specialised field and this is reflected in the cost of hiring a professional seo company.

Black Hat techniques:

There are still many people selling SEO services that use “black hat” techniques in order to gain high rankings in the search engines. By “black hat” techniques I mean unethical techniques that cheat the search engines, for example “cloaking” or “doorway” pages. These techniques may cause a temporary rise in rankings for a website but you run the risk of being banned by the search engines.

Keywords:

It is very difficult to optimise a website for many keywords. You may be able to rank top for some of your keywords but if you sell thousands of individual products then that is only a small fraction of your market.

Another option available to businesses wishing to promote their website on Google is to use their Pay Per Click Advertising programme- Google Ad words.Google Ad Words allows a website to instantly appear on the first pages of Google for any keywords related to your product or service.

Your listing appears on the right hand side of the “natural” results as a “sponsored link”. The beauty of this advertising method is that it is highly targeted. What I mean by this is that your website is put in front of people who are as far into the buying cycle as possible, they are searching to buy a particular product or service. Compare this to more traditional advertising like listings in the press. Lets say you place an advert in a local newspaper on page Twelve. The newspaper has 100 000 readers weekly. So 90 000 read page twelve. 20 000 readers noticed your ad and of those readers 500 chose to remember your company name for future reference. Of these 500 readers 50 actually think of you next time they require your product or service. So from 100 000 readers you have gained 50 new customers. Now with Google Ad Words your advert only appears when someone types in a keyword related to your product or service. Its like everybody reading the newspaper seeing your advert plus you only pay when they visit your website.

There is no minimum budget for Google Ad Words. If you wanted to spend one pound a day then that’s fine. You bid on your keywords and set the price you are willing to pay for each visitor to your website. Average price per click is approximately £0.05 to £1.00 but it completely depends on the competitiveness of the market.

Where you are positioned in the “sponsored links” depends on two things- your bid price for your keywords and your click through rate (the number of times your listing has been shown divided by the number of times your advert is clicked.) The higher the click through rate the more “relevant” Google deems your advert and you are rewarded with being higher up in the listings.

Google Ad Words is used by millions of people every day promoting their websites and increasing traffic and sales. It is relatively straightforward to set up and operate so what are you waiting for……

Ways To Improve Your Site with Google Analytics

admin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:11:22 +0000

Among all the free web site stats analyzer, I think Google analytics is the best solution for your site because of its utility, richness and depth analysis. You are able to make informed editorial, navigational and page design decisions to boost your site’s traffic and effectiveness with the data that Google gives you.
Signup & installation
Google Analytics was launched in 2005; growth was initially slow due to the frustrating waiting list system initiated by Google to avoid over stretching their servers. Now the waiting list has been removed and anybody can sign up to use this great service.
You just need to visit Google analytics and signup for free Google analytics account.
Once your account is set up, to get Google Analytics tracking your site’s page views, drop a snippet of JavaScript onto your site’s pages (much like Sitemeter.) The guide should help you find your way around the new system. You just have to copy paste the JavaScript in the pages you want Google to track.
E.g.

If you’re a blogger, just include the Google Analytics code into all your blogging software’s templates.

Powerful report generating tool
Google Analytics has all the features you’d expect from a high-end analytics offering. It also provides tightly integrated AdWords support to view AdWords ROI metrics without importing cost data or add keyword tracking codes.
If you have an AdWords account, you can use Google Analytics directly from the AdWords interface. Google Analytics also calculates ROI metrics from automatically imported cost and keyword tracking data, by saving you time.
There are various ways to track your different needs for your site.
If your site allows downloads you can keep record of your downloads by simply adding a script in your site.
E.g.

Tracking ecommerce site
Tracking where your visitor come from is the most important thing you should know. You come to know from which search engine visitors come searching for your site.
Sales reports by traffic sources can be found under the “Traffic Sources > All Traffic Sources” section of the menu.

Tracking your sales
To track your sales you will need to use server side script on your confirmation page (the page people see after they complete a transaction on your site) to populate a form in the following format:

Example
UTM:T|34535|Main Store|111108.06|8467.06|10.00|San Diego|CA|USA
UTM:I|34535|XF-1024|Urchin T-Shirt|Shirts|11399.00|9
UTM:I|34535|CU-3424|Urchin Drink Holder|Accessories|20.00|2

Once you have populated the form, GA will start tracking your sales right away.
Redesign of your site
If you are planning to redesign your site and want to keep your screen resolution according to the most commonly used resolution, according to different browsers or flash installed ask Google analytics for your queries. Just go to ‘web design parameters’ for all the valuable data you want!

Above listed features is only the scratch of Google analytics. According to me Google analytics is one of the best web sites analyzing report generating tool build so far.
If you have not used Google analytics yet try it and I am sure you will love its rich features.