Many millions of people worldwide rely on Google as their search engine of choice. However, with over 3 billion pages to search through, the results can often be overwhelming. Here are my top seven tips for searching more effectively using Google.
- 1. Search for a whole phrase. By simply putting the words you are looking for within a “…” Google will restrict its search to sites which use that phrase in its entirety. For example, if you searched for Big Blue House, Google would return any pages which featured those three words. By searching for “Big Blue House” it will only return pages which include that exact phrase.
- 2. Definitions. By using the term “define:” Google will return a number of definitions and links for your selected word.
- 3. Calculator. Google will perform simple arithmetic through its search bar by using “+ – * /” and parentheses.
- 4. Unit Conversions. By typing the information into the search bar Google will perform conversions for you – anything from kilos to pounds or from dollars to yen.
- 5. Wildcard. The * works as a wildcard in Google. If you have a phrase and you are missing one word you can replace it with the * and Google will return options for you. This is particularly useful when searching for song lyrics you are not entirely sure of.
- 6. Synonyms. By using the ~ symbol (the “tilde”) before a word Google will not only search for that word but also its synonyms. If you were to search for “~kids beds” for example, Google would return results for both “kids beds” and “childrens beds”.
- 7. Advanced search. If you can’t remember these shortcuts or need additional refinements then simply use Google’s “advanced search” option.
With so many pages available, these various clever shortcuts will help you refine your search. Google can help you find answers to life, the universe and everything you ask about…!
Ranking for Singular and Plural Keywords
I had a client ask me earlier why her website appeared for the search term ‘lesbian forums’ but not for ‘lesbian forum’. As a domain becomes stronger and more authoritative through editorial endorsements (mainly links pointing back the the website using a variation of anchor text fro various websites).
Pretty Pink Pearl is a lesbian social network website that thrives on an interactive community creating interesting posts and relevant forums so having a good placement in the search engines is paramount.
Search engines generally look at plural keywords for high volume search terms. To rank for both keyword terms you will need to optimise for both terms. So, by including the keywords throughout the webpage high in the page copy and in header tags, getting inbound text links for both terms from highly ranking and high authority pages.
Bing
Bing is a decision search engine engineered by Microsoft and officially announced on May 28th, 2009. Bing uses technology from the Farecast and Powerset acquisitions combined with new algorithms which seems in the early days to be providing very relevant results. Bing also fashions a colorful page design which is ever changing and looks great.
Bing as a brand is also an attempt to eliminate the confusion caused by Microsoft’s “Windows Live” branding. Bing is now everything “search” related, whereas Windows Live encompasses the remnants of Microsoft’s consumer software products.
Google is to the late nineties and early nineties what Alta Vista is to the early nineties. Google pretty much dominates the search engine market and recent news suggests that MSN and Yahoo want a slice of the pie.
Google not only provides search and advertising services but also provides a plethora of tools and applications including Gmail, Google Maps and You Tube. Most of these tools are free (services such as Postini are subscription based) and the majority of Google incomes comes through the targetted advertising AdWords and AdSense platforms.
Google is moving towards the web-based applications with acquisitions including Jotspot, 2Web Technologies and Zenter which are very similiar to Word applications and maybe a pre-cursor to a competitor to Word as Google has stated it’s intentions to launch its very own operating system.
The launch of Bing has certainly showed that Microsoft is ready to take on the dominant search engine Google. Bing was launched in the United States on 3rd June 2009 and it started off with a healthy 8% market share of all web searches in that first month. After just one month Bing seems to be gaining ground on Google and from a personal basis the search quality results seem very favourable.
Will Bing ever catch Google? It is unclear. Obviously, Microsoft have the determination and the financial clout to compete with Google but it will be an uphill struggle. In the online marketing industry Google are seen as the paid advertising search engine with lots of emphasis on its revenue generation and it’s close ties with Apple may cause some to believe that Google is now becoming just like Microsoft.
The web users getting bored or frustrated with Googles results may now turn to Bing as a credible alternative. Bing certainly looks funky and cutting edge but time will tell. I hate to say it on a personal level but Microsoft may have done alright this time…they still need to sort out their browsers though.
The Importance of Link Building
Link building is one of the cornerstones of a successful internet marketing campaign. It is also one of the most time consuming and frustrating of all online marketing tasks.
There is no doubt about it, you will need to try and increase the quality and quantity of links pointing to your website in order to increase the visibility and traffic to your website. This article is designed to be a comprehensive guide to link building and will, over the next few weeks, introduce the reader to the concepts and techniques based on experience by the website specialists EyePlot Web Design.
The first three articles will cover the basic structure and functionality of links, why they are critical to an internet marketing campaign and how the search engines use them in their algorithms. Articles four, five and six will cover strategies for research and help the reader decide on quality of links. The rest of the articles will cover link building strategies.
The Basics of Link Based Search Engines
When the Google search engine model was created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin they had pioneered a new way of determining the quality of a webpage. After all, if you can serve quality websites to your users then more people will use it. The more people use your search engine the more market share you control. The more market share you control the more you can charge for advertising space. At its simplest PageRank is based on a system where a link from a particular webpage is a ‘vote of confidence’ from one page to another. The theory works that by measuring not only the keyword prevalence of a webpage but also the ‘amount of votes’ a webpage has, then the webpage is considered more important by Google. It is therefore awarded greater PageRank. Also, the greater importance or PageRank a voting webpage has, the greater amount of importance (PageRank) is passed on. In layman’s terms, it is better to get quality links from quality webpages rather than low quality links from low quality web pages.
This model was soon manipulated by webmasters in the same way that metatags were manipulated in the late nineties. Therefore, webmasters knew that by getting lots of links from web pages they could achieve high ranking websites. This model still applies in a limited way today (July 2008) although Goolge has improved its ranking system since.
You can easily determine the PageRank of a particular webpage by downloading a PageRank toolbar for your browser or by visiting a PageRank checking website such as http://www.pageranktool.net/
Improvements in the Ranking System
Since 1998 most of the major search engines has based their systems on the link based ranking model. Some search engines have slightly different algorithms from each other which is why you get different results from different engines. Even in Google you will see different results as queries are served from different datacentres in order to share the burden of processing resources. There is a constant battle to create more relevant results in order to become market dominant and therefore sell that precious commodity of targeted advertising space.
Not only are links counted towards ranking but also the text used to link pages together which is called the ‘anchor’ text. The internet is based on ‘hyper links’ and has always used this form of linking pages together. Anchor text is now taken into consideration by the search engines when pages are indexed and every few months the indexed pages are checked and processed to determine the inter linked relationship between web pages. The technology, quality and ‘intelligence’ of these search engines algorithms are evolving everyday in order to provide the most relevant results from a user search query. Remember, the search engines need relevant search queries in order to gain market dominance and make themselves more money through the extraordinarily profitable targeted advertising they sell.
Lets take the football team ‘Huddersfield Town’ as an example. For those of you not aware of this football team it is a team based in West Yorkshire, England. If lots of webpages link to the Huddersfield Town football clubs homepage using the link text ‘Huddersfield Town FC’ then the website will rank well for that term. Those links are much more valuable than a ‘click here’ text link. The search engines therefore use this link text to determine what the linked page is about. Therefore, if the Huddersfield Town FC homepage has title tags and relevant text to ‘Huddersfield Town FC’ then Google will place even more importance on this link. In the early days some people used to ‘Google Bomb’ whereby lots of different webmasters would use anchor text to direct to a webpage so it would rank naturally for search terms in the anchor text. The most famous example was George Bush and the ‘miserable failure’ – link to BBC site
Google will also take into consideration the semantic attributes of the link in terms of the text surrounding the link. This is again a recently added evolved practise of the search engines. So, if the page making the link is about the economy of Italy and has a link it will not hold as much weight as if that linking page were discussing the strengths of the Huddersfield Towns midfield or central defence or indeed football tactics in general.
Also, a link from the local council or high authority body would hold much more weight than a web blog of an unknown fan. I always make the analogy of a well known local doctor giving a person a character reference as oppose to a random bloke from the local pub. Some of the best links to get are from .edu or .gov bodies as these naturally hold more ‘trust and authority’ in the eyes of Google which will be covered shortly.
Search engines also take into account relationships between websites such as the IP addresses of the websites (to ensure one person isn’t creating a network of sites on one server in order to manipulate the search engine rankings), domain name registration through something similar to WHO IS again to ensure these links or more organic than contrived. There are many things the search engines will look at (which is part of the reason Google and related search engines buy software companies to incorporate these into their algorithms).
Onsite Optimisation
Therefore, by using the above techniques, Google can try to create a ranking system based on organic user linking as oppose to singe web masters manipulating the search engines. Web masters cannot manipulate search engine ranking through on site factors alone. That is not to say however that search engines do not take into account navigation, page structure and the semantic layout of content as they do. It is also possible in less competitive industries to rank well using purely on site techniques, however it is near on impossible to do so on more competitive terms.
The link based model simply places higher importance on the assumption that a high quality website with interesting copy will attract links organically from other well designed and quality websites. You should always bear this in mind when obtaining links. You should say to yourself ‘would I class this link from this website as a quality link?’. Sometimes of course you can obtain low quality links in the hope that they will one day become quality but that is a matter of judgment.
The Trust Factor
Going back to the doctor analogy I made earlier, the search engines also place a fair amount of importance on the trust of a linking domain. Again, a link from a trusted domain is seen to be less likely to be spammy than one from an unknown website. This again is to reduce the likely hood of spammy links or manipulation of the search results. One single link from a website such as the BBC is worth more in Googles eyes than 100 links from unknown websites with little trust. In a self perpetuating cycle, trusted sites become trusted over a period of years and from obtaining links from other trusted sites. In a way it tells Google who already knows about these trusted sites that you are worthwhile listening to and are therefore providing decent, high quality content.
Also, as a by product of receiving links from trusted sites you become trusted yourself and can start to become authorative and give out the Google love yourself.
In the next article we will be discussing more about links.
It seems as though Yahoo has been around since the internet was born. This search engine company was originally founded in 1994, and it keeps on growing even today. Many people use this search engine as their main searching tool for its user-friendly web design. In fact, it remains one of the most popular search engines on the web. While this company was build upon a simple web search idea, there are many other products that are owned by the company today. Some of the most popular sites that are run by Yahoo are the ones that prove to be incredibly easy to use.
Yahoo Maps, Messenger, Mail, and Groups are the main sites that this company owns. All of these sites have been developed by designers that want to make the web a friendlier place. It seems as though these designers have succeeded in this task, since more people find these services easy to use. While there are certainly a lot of other search engines, map companies, and messenger companies out there, those that are loyal to this one company tend to stay loyal. In actuality, those that have grown up using the services that this company provides still use them today.
What makes Yahoo so different from all the rest? It can all be summed up to one simple concept – the internet community is a friendlier place thanks to companies such as these. Nearly anyone can use the internet these days. Even though the web began as a mess of numbers of hard to read sites, this isn’t the same web that exists today. Thanks to the web 2.0 generation, those programmers and designers that currently build websites have one goal in common: to make the web accessible for everyone. What does any of this have to do with that famous search engine?
Without companies such as Yahoo, searching for information on the web would be difficult. Using great designs, clickable links, large search boxes, and accurate information, this search engine remains one of the top on the web. Sure, there are plenty of competitors out there, but you’ll probably find that this one company tends to shine above the rest. Have you tried out this search engine? Have you compared it to other ones? If so, you’re sure to discover what so many people already know – there’s nothing hard about using any of the programs created by this company.
It is a very exciting time for us search engine marketeers with new types of data being made accessible for search purposes. The major thing to restrict search is the data availibilty. Once a piece of data is tagged with meta data it can be found. For example, if your mobile phone held various data about you then you friends could find out which club you are in on a Saturday night up town (rather like Google Latitude).
Google has been talking about personailised search for quite some time. In the future i think we will start to see ‘related’ websites from a search query. For example, if you queried ‘Gigs in Huddersfield’ i don’t think it would be unreasonable to start seeing websites regarding the following.
- Bands in Huddersfield (related websites)
- Band Venues in Huddersfield (Sponsored listings)
- Guitar shops in Huddersfield (Related products)
- Band Insurance (Sponsored listings)
- Music Clothing Stores in Huddersfield (Related products)
- Music Reviews from Huddersfield (News sites)
- Alternative Results (Similiar queries in nearby towns)
Now, imagine that all our browsing and purchasing habits are captureed and stored – rather like what happens with Amazon when you are offered ‘Books you may be interested in’. Obvisoulsy, this will require extreme trust from the major search engines and would be a spammers dream should any data be lost. However, if we are confident that by releasing some personal data about ourselves then the search engines may use the information in a beneficial way. The search engines will know information about us and make assumptions about our lifestyle, interests, disposible income all from previous purchases and feed us relevant results accordingly. Google will also pick up data about where you live from you IP address and previous search history and serve more localised results. The search engines know that we like doing our food shopping from Tescos so it suggests that when we perform a search that a special offer from Tescos, ASDA and Morrisons are included but the high end stores like Marks and Spencers and Waitrose are not.
I think we will start to see a rise in personalised search soon from the major search engines.
How Do I get More Pages Indexed in Google?
We get asked this fairly regularly. So, how do you get more pages indexed in Google? Here we go. Over simplified i know but it makes it easier to understand.
OK, so the world wide is is large. Very large in fact and even the great Googel is not 100% sure just how big it is. In fact, most of the internet is utter tripe and worthless junk. Google therefore only indexes a portion of the web. It does have the money of course to buy additional computers but is it really wrth the time, effort and bandwidth it would take to index pages that are essentially junk? This is where Google’s content duplication checking comes into play but that’s a whole different article. Google is in fact believed to have the largest crawling and indexing facilities at present.
Googlebots go out and pull down web pages and then analyse the contents of that page and stores a representation of that webpage in Google large database index. The index is not a complete copy of the internet. It is a representation of the better pages on the internet. From that index PageRank is calculated and the algorithms determine the search results. The only pages that can show up when a user performs a search query are the pages included in Googles index. If your page is not included in the index then it will not show for a particular search term.
Becasue therefore, the web as a whole is much larger than the database index Google has to make a decision on what webpages it will spider and from there what it will index. If Google indexed every webpage that it was aware of it would take up far too much processing power and resources used to currently update news pages and current affair websites. Therefore, Google does not index every webpage it knows about.
So, How do i get more pages indexed by Google?
Google has limited resources so cannot index the whole internet. So, how do you get more pages indexed? How does Google look towards allocating resources across the internet and the webpages? Google does have a large but ultimately limited range of url’s that it can index. Therefore, it if in a webmasters interets to make taht job as easy as possible for Googlebot. The easier the job you make for Googlebot the more likely it will send a bit of time on your website.
It is generally believed that Google will index a site better if that website has a higher PageRank. If you have a few pages and they are all a decent PageRank they will get into the index no problem. However, the problem arises when you have many webpages with very low Pagerank. These pages can even fall into the supplemental index.
Clean Code Helps
Ensuring that you have clean HTML code and that there is not lots if internal javascript or flash menus etc that can impede a spiders accessibility is a great way to ensure you get spidered and indexed. Reducing any ‘white niose’ from your web pages also increases download speeds and decreases bandwidth usage.
Duplicate Content
Search engine marketeers pay a lot of attention to duplicate content, link building, increasing PageRank (though the latter is not as important now for a purely ranking factor) and improving link struture through internal navigation. By improving link structure a webmaster can start to spread out PageRank throughout the website. However, from a personal point i think that quality of code is paramount in creating a search engine friendly website.
Increasing Page rank to improve Indexing
Probably the most important factor in getting your website to be indexed more by Google is to increase PageRank which in turn is increased through global link popularity of your website. The best way to achieve this is by getting links from other high PageRank websites. This will be dicussed in greater depth at another point.
The team at SeoMoz have not only indexed the whole of the internet but have now launched a search engine.
The search engine is a user generated search engine whereby users submit a URL and associated search terms. I can see a big potential for much spamming but i’m sure the fellas at SeoMoz have looked at this and catered for it?
Will be interesting to see what happens. It can be found here WebFluence
One of the best SEO tips for small business is to think like a big business. Consumers on the internet have no idea how big or small your business is and there is no reason to tell them unless that is your pitch, that you are a small business and that’s why they should do business with you over a big business. If that’s your game great, but the idea still applies. You want to use the same SEO techniques that big business uses to bring in new customers. Tried and true SEO tools that can help you expand your business.
Probably the most useful SEO tips for small business are to use keywords and keyword phrases wisely. Key words and keyword phrases are used for internet searches on sites like Google. It’s the actual search words a web surfer punches into the site. When your website content is rich with keywords and phrases that are related to your product or services, the search engine takes the browser to the landing pages that have those words embedded in their content. Successful placement and use of keywords can increase web traffic to your site exponentially. Indeed, this is one of the best SEO tips for small business out there. Get into the habit of constantly thinking of keywords and phrases that can keep you at the top of the search lists.
Some other SEO tips for small business include using links, especially deep linking techniques and consider a wide variety of link exchanges. Using links to draw people to your website through SEO is an art and when it is done well it can really drive the traffic to your website. It’s easy to do and with the flexibility of the internet you can change up links as often as needed to keep up with changes in the marketplace. Using links well is among the top SEO tips for small business success.
There are lots of SEO tips for small business and all should be considered, just make sure that the tips for small business that you use are relative to your specific business. Some techniques won’t work as well for one kind of business over another type of business. You want the SEO components of your website to be relative to your specific products or services. It is time to put SEO at the forefront of your marketing thinking and use it well.