Jennifer Laycock, of Search Engine Guide, begins a fascinating six-part blog series on the “Pinocchio Effect” in search. By that she means “…deep down, search engines want nothing more than to be real boys (or girls). That’s right, it’s that simple. As search engine engineers gain more and more ability to tailor the algorithms, their ultimate goal is to help the search engines make choices the way that people do.” 
Jennifer’s seeks to explain where this sort of “humanistic” thinking leads in terms of search strategy. Since aspects of human development are ever-changing and approximate, search becomes a fertile field for…
Use alt tags to improve your web pages’ SEO quality. Your images can be sitting there lifeless, yet with the addition of a few keywords, they can bring in new search traffic to your site.
The best keywords to use are related ones that you could not work into the original text. In addition, your images can link back to other relevant pages within your website, boosting their visibility as well. Once searchers have come to your site via alt tag keywords, they will be drawn in by the additional available links.
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…
Basic SEO advice: Submit your site to the search engines, but don’t stop there. Submitting your site to Google, Yahoo et. al. won’t hurt, but it won’t do much good either. Like a handshake, it’s what follows that counts. Search engine spiders still have to crawl your site for it to be included in the search indexes. (When you enter a query, it’s compared to an index of the Web, not the Web itself.) And you get spiders’ attention by having simply designed, content-focused pages. If you don’t submit your site, they’ll likely crawl it anyway. So focus on optimization,…
It helps every so often to repeat that designing a site for optimized search results means keeping the design clean and simple. Here’s another blog post making that point. Nothing fancy, limited graphics, attention to content. Insuring that keywords reflect content on each page. (Consider them virtually as separate pages for seo purposes.)
“Search engine optimization at its heart is simple and clean. Don’t worry so much about the scary technical stuff if you’re just starting out. Start slowly, read, learn, read some more. Most of all, be patient with yourself. Learning search engine optimization takes time, just like any other subject.”…
JEFF COTRUPE
I just launched a new site for my business. Same domain, http://marketpowerLLC.com, but anyone who saw the old site may not even recognize us as the same company today. In planning the launch I realized one of the first things I look for as a site visitor is a search capability. Not of the whole web; I can get to Google or Yahoo! via my own bookmarks, thank you, and I never understand companies who provide web search but no search of their own site. Or, as is still the case at a surprising number of sites: No search at all.…
Fresh out of beta testing, SEMrush delivers extensive keyword research to improve your search engine ranking. Using Google search results, they can show you how well your website ranks on the most popular keywords.
Offering free and paid services to meet your needs no matter how large or small your company is, SEMrush is working hard to meet your keyword research needs. If you are looking for a new way to analyze your page rank and keyword placement, the folks at SEMrush are striving to deliver.
A software package that’s similar (only paid) to Firefox’s SEOQuake, described yesterday on Shootout, is SEO SpyGlass. SpyGlass allows you to analyze web pages, including those of your competitors, for factors that produce high search engine rankings. 
MacWorld reports that Yahoo! plans to convert to anonymity the data it keeps on Web searches in three months instead of 13. That will be the least amount of time web search data is identifiable as to individuals among Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!
For privacy advocates, “neutering” search data is a big deal. ”Google said in September,” MacWord advises, “that it would anonymize data after nine months, down from 18 months. Microsoft keeps data for 18 months, although it said earlier this month it would reduce the period to six months if its rivals did the same.
“Technology companies have maintained they needed to keep the…
Here, from Resource Nation, are ten more tips for website design for legitimate SEO benefits. 
