26 December 2008
Open letter to GOOGLE
Chairman and CEO: Eric E. Schmidt
Co-Founder and President, Products: Larry Page
President, Technology and Director: Sergey Brin
SVP Product Management: Jonathan Rosenberg
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Gentlemen:
I find myself posing questions about Google PageRank to various web experts and link brokers and decided it was only fair to ask you directly about it here. After all, Google PageRank does kind of cut to the heart of everything we’re doing, or trying to do, on places like SEO Shootout–a site which, btw, my Google toolbars in both Firefox and IE currently indicate as having a PageRank of 3.
I myself labor…
Getting good mileage from the keywords on your website pages is a core principle of effective design for being noticed by search engines. How do you know what keywords have the most currency? That is, how often do searchers use given words or phrases? Two tools for checking on the frequency with which keywords (and, if you’re lucky, synonyms) are used are: Google’s Keyword Tool and the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool.
So, most definitely, plan and write your site with keywords in mind for each page.
Viewzi, calling itself a “visual search engine,” has released its 19th variation on ways to view search results collected in various layouts – this one a Celebrity Gossip theme. 
Jabbing at the big guys, Viewzi says “traditional search is boring.” Gone are the blue links on a white background. Instead, Viewzi provides highly graphic displays of its search results, in various “View” categories.
“On the Viewzi Celebrity Gossip View, users can choose between top stories from the very best celebrity news sites like TMZ, Perez Hilton, Yahoo!, PopSugar and Just Jared in a large news ticker at the top of the search…
Yesterday, Google released a formal SEO Starter Guide on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. This beginner’s guide is not only good for those just starting to learn SEO, but a reinforcement of search engine best practices for seasoned webmasters and SEOs, too.
Topics of note include:
- Page Titles
- Description Meta Tag
- URL Structure
- Site Navigation
- Creating Quality Content
- Anchor Text
- Heading Tags (H1s, H2s, etc.)
- Image Optimization
- Robots.txt
- Rel=”nofollow”
- Website Promotion
- Webmaster Tools
- Analytics
- More Resources
One item of note that was suspiciously missing was the importance of inbound links. Does this mean that Google thinks inbound links are useless? Should internet marketers who evangelize link popularity rethink their SEO strategy? The quick answer to this…
Using alt attributes, otherwise known as “alt tags” or alternative text, is another SEO technique. Every image on a website should contain this tag with descriptive information about the image. Adding targeted keywords to the alt tag can drive good search engine traffic either in web searches or image searches.
Additionally, according to Wikipedia, alternative text is especially useful in the following situations:
- For people with low bandwidth connections, who may opt not to load graphics
- For people using handheld devices
- For people with disabilities who use assistive technology, such as refreshable braille displays or screen readers (see also Section 508)
- For people who may not…
H1 heading tags - use them!
SEO Tip: H1 tags
The H1 heading tag is an important component to your organic SEO agenda. Google assumes more important content resides in the H1 tag than body content.
For added optimization, include a popular and relevant search keyword. But make sure it is relevant to the content that is on the page. If the content on the page is about, say, diabetic supplies - the h1 tag better reflect that.
H1 tags are important for the reader as well - it gives them an idea of what the page is about on a quick scan. They should be…
Introducing SEO Shootout’s SEO Tip of the Day
We all know how important it is to do thorough keyword research before embarking on an SEO project. In addition to knowing how many searches have taken place for a particular keyword or key phrase, it’s also important to know the competing results - that is, how many total indexed pages are competing for that phrase as well. It’s important to go for the “low hanging fruit” - that is those relevant words or phrases that have significant searches, but a lower amount of pages competing for it.
- - - - -
SEO Shootout’s SEO Tip…
Popular gossip Blogger Perez Hilton always like to push things to the limit; it’s true of his page title as well as of his journalism.
It’s common wisdom that anything after the first 10 words of a page title are ignored by search engines.
So, leave it to Perez to use 11. After all, he has been such a diligent self-promoter he doesn’t need a last name anymore!
- - - - -
Abigail Hamilton is a professional with over a decade of experience in small business, enterprise, and business-to-business design and marketing. She loves writing for the Web, creating and maintaining brand identities, and…
The other day a friend who works for Google in Internationalization was in town, and because her schedule was full of meetings we ended up having lunch at the cafeteria in the Google Engineering building in Seattle’s Fremont district. I missed the opportunity to snap a few photos, which is a shame. The salt and pepper grinders on the tables were colorful lucite in Google colors, and the chairs were colored plastic, too. I loved that the decor made you feel like you were on a Google Web page.
I learned a little about what she’s doing, which was interesting, too:…
