Archive for seo

Google Webmaster Tools Diagnostics: Web Crawl

October 14th, 2008 • seo
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Yesterday I wrote my first post on Google Webmaster Tools which aimed to give an introduction about webmaster tools. Today I’ll go over the Diagnostics section which gives details of results of web crawl and mobile crawl and also provide content analysis of your web site.

Let me start with Web Crawl. Here is a screen shot of Web Crawl Diagnostics page:

Google Webmaster Tools Web Crawl

Google Webmaster Tools Web Crawl

In this page seven sub-section are listed. Which are:

  1. Errors for URLs in Sitemaps
  2. HTTP errors
  3. Not found
  4. URLs not followed
  5. URLs restricted by robots.txt
  6. URLs timed out
  7. Unreachable URLs

I’ve already explained what these sections cover in my previous post about Google Webmaster Tools. Web Crawl Diagnostics page gives details of the errors encountered. It provides the problematic URL as well as the exact reason of problem (HTTP404, HTTP500, robots.txt?). Normally we can group these problems in to two sets. Problems in one set occurs when bots unable to reach the content (your server is down, or you’ve misconfigured your site, or you’re blocking Google bot via robots.txt). The other set is about problematic URLs. Some reasons can be:

  • Some external web pages links to some non-existent content in your site: A URL pointing to a non-existing article in your blog.
  • Some pages in your site links to non-existent content else where in your site: You give links to a previous post, later you decided to delete that post. And the links you’ve provided remains broken.
  • Content is there but URL is broken: For example you list items in your web site by their titles (i.e. web page of “my item” is “http://www.example.com/items/my+item”). And you forgot to handle a special case where titles contains a slash: Web page of “My Item / Item Color” will be “http://www.example.com/items/my+item/item+color” which will definitely be a problematic URL. You actually have an item in your database but you’re unable to link to it.

This list can be extended.

To reduce the problems in the first set there’s not much work to do: You have to check your server status. If it was down for a time, next time Google bot visits number of problems will reduce. If the problems are robots.txt related, you have to recheck your rules.

Second set is complicated a bit. Because there can be too many reasons. The page pointing to your site (providing wrong URL to Google Bot) will definitely be of great use. Until today there were no way of knowing this. Fortunately, today a new post on Google Webmaster Central Blog announced a new feature of Google Webmaster Tools, which is exactly what we are looking for. In each subsection there is a column named “Linked From” under which the pages linking to that problematic URL is listed. Using this information it’ll be much easier to track the problem.

That’s it for now. I’ll go over the content analysis next time.

Google Webmaster Tools - A Starters Guide

October 13th, 2008 • 2 comments seo
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Hi,

Today I’ll start a series of posts about Google Webmaster Tools. This posts will be tutorial-alike and I’m planning to give basic elements of tools. If you’re already familiar with these tools, don’t waste your time. You can read one of my previous posts about:

or you can go somewhere else.

Anyway, let’s start. First of all, you need a Google acount for this. After you logged in to webmaster account you’ll see the dashboard. Dashboard will look like this:

Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard

Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard

All of your sites will be listed in dashboard. I’ve marked three point on the screenshot. First one is the “Messages”. This is the link to the message center. From time to time you will get notices about some of your sites. These notices will be listed in your message center. And sometimes message center will be unavailable. And I don’t know why. Don’t ask. So what notices can you get? Things like “crawl rate changed”, reconsideration requests and some crawl problems.

  • I’ll explain this “crawl rate” thing later.
  • Reconsideration requests are seems to be important but truly I haven’t got any results from a reconsideration request yet. Normally you can ask Google to reconsider your site which is banned (Google thinks that your site is spammy? dangerous? ) After a reconsideration request, all you have to do is wait for a return. I’m waiting for more than a year and when I got a return I’ll make you learn.
  • Crawl problems are the most important ones, as you may guess. You have to follow these notices and try to resolve them immediately.

The second mark is the “add site” form. Using this form you can add your site to your webmaster tools account. Of course you’ll need to verify your site. After you added a site, it’ll appear in the third area marked. Later you can use these links to directly go to that sites reports. So if you haven’t added a site yet, just type your url and hit the “Add Site” button. Now you got a site listed in dashboard and a cross under the “Verified” section. So let’s click it and verify your site. Verification can be done in two ways:

  1. Using a meta tag: You need to add the provided meta tag to your index page. This means that this meta tag should be accessible from your home page (http://www.example.com). So all you have to do is just copy the line and paste to the header of your site (between <head> and </head> tags)
  2. Using a html file: You need to create an empty file named exactly as Google says. So if it provides google0e42cde8782c894c.html you have to create that file in the top level of your web root. And it must be accessible as http://www.example.com/google0e42cde8782c894c.html.

After you choose one of the two ways just hit the “Verify” button and Google will handle the rest. After verification completed you can go the “Overview” section. This is the starting point when you next click your site from dashboard. Here is a screenshot of it:

Google Webmaster Tools Overview

Google Webmaster Tools Overview

Lets start from the top. “Home page crawl” section gives the time of last crawl of your homepage. If your site is new, it’ll take time to see something on this section. In order to get indexed as quick as possible you can follow my way. It’ll be good for you to keep these crawl times. Later you’ll be able to see how often Google bot visits your site — and of course changes in frequency. “Index status” will give an overview of your site’s index status. Either some of your pages are included in index or not. And either some of your pages from your sitemap are included or not. You can find details of inclusion in other sections. For now let’s skip it.

Below we got an important section: “Web crawl errors”. Let’s go over them:

  • Errors for URLs in Sitemaps: This gives the number of erroneous URLs listed in your sitemap. If your sitemap is auto-generated (output of a plugin etc.) most probably the url strucure will be correct. So the errors will be due to server downtime or something like that. You have to view the “Details” and inspect the errors. If urls are broken you should remove them from your sitemap. It’s really a bad idea to provide broken links in your sitemap. After correcting the problems these errors will be gone during next crawl.
  • HTTP errors: This section contains urls that give an HTTP error (401, 404, 407 etc.): “Article not found”, “Item not found” etc. First of all you have to think about the reason of existance of this url. How Google bot was able to react that url? Who gave a broken link? May be you have changed your url structure lately and created some broken links?
  • Not found: Again broken links. (HTTP 404)
  • URLs not followed: Mostly you got errors due to redirects. You should always be careful with redirects.
  • URLs restricted by robots.txt: I’ll go over the robots.txt later. If you don’t know what robots.txt is and some urls are listed in this section than there is a problem. You can use robots.txt file to protect some of your urls to not to get indexed. So if this list contains a url that you want to get indexed than inspect your robots.txt.
  • URLs timed out: This section is also important. If Google bot encountered a time out probably there is an issue with your web server. Or your HTML is too large?
  • Unreachable URLs: Get rid of these urls or make them reachable.

I guess this enough for this post. I’ll continue later. See you.

iphone and google image search.

October 7th, 2008 • 1 comment image search, seo
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Iphone Mockups

Iphone Mockups

IPhone 2

IPhone 2

Apple Iphone, iphone nano, iphone shuffle, iphone keyboard

Apple Iphone Keyboard

Apple Iphone In Hand Thumb,Apple Iphone, iphone nano, iphone shuffle, iphone keyboard

Apple Iphone In Hand Thumb

I was trying to figure how image search rankings work. Did I find any clue? No. Here, I tried to find an image of iphone and look what I got:

All of the images are high quality. Details of pages are given below:

  • informationarchitects.jp:
    • PageRank: 6
    • PageRank of the page that contains image: 5
    • Alt Text: iPhone, iPhone Nano, iPhone Shuffle
    • Image Name: http://www.informationarchitects.jp/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/iphone_2.png
    • Article about iphone? Yes.
    • URL contains iphone keyword? Yes.
  • www.techdigest.tv:
    • PageRank: 6
    • PageRank of the page that contains image: 3
    • Alt Text: apple-iphone-in-hand.jpg
    • Image Name: http://techdigest.tv/apple-iphone-in-hand-thumb.jpg
    • Article about iphone? Yes.
    • URL contains iphone keyword? Yes.
  • www.breakitdownblog.com:
    • PageRank: 6
    • PageRank of the page that contains image: 4
    • Alt Text: iPhone Keyboard Typing Email
    • Image Name: http://www.breakitdownblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/apple-iphone-keyboard.jpg
    • Article about iphone? Yes.
    • URL contains iphone keyword? Yes.
  • gizmodo.com:
    • PageRank: 8
    • PageRank of the page that contains image: 2
    • Alt Text: none
    • Image Name: http://gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2007/01/iphone_mockups.jpg
    • Article about iphone? Yes.
    • URL contains iphone keyword? Yes.

So what actually affect image search rankings? I really don’t know.

Say No To NoFollow!

October 3rd, 2008 • seo, wordpress
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Say No To NoFollow

Say No To NoFollow

nofollow is an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring in the first place.

This is what Wikipedia says about nofollow attribute. It means that, if you use nofollow attribute in your links, search engine spiders will not use that link in target site’s ranking calculations. Under normal terms if a site links to your page, it’ll add some value to your page’s ranking. However if that site add a nofollow attribute, than that value will not be counted by search engines. After some time, spammers realized that they can build a large link set just posting automatic comments to random blogs or adding links to wikipedia. To remedy this situation, authorities suggested to add a nofollow attribute automatically to the links in comments etc. However it seems that this doesn’t work any more. Spammers still post automated comments. For wordpress - and most of popular content managements systems - the best way to keep spam away is comment moderation. For the search engine optimization view, allowing do-follow comments will encourage your readers to drop comments since each comment will be counted as a backlink to their site. So no need to talk more about the benefits of dofollow links : ) Just say no to nofollow!

U Comment I Follow

U Comment I Follow

For Wordpress you can use the NoFollow-Free plugin to change the Wordpress’ default behaviour.

RunSEORun Keyword Plugin For Wordpress

September 26th, 2008 • RunSEORun Wordpress Plugins, seo, wordpress
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Hi,

After I wrote this post, I started to add some keywords using Google Adwords Keyword Tool for every post I wrote. I guess all of you already know about this tool. If you haven’t heard it, just do some googling and you’ll be amazed. Anyway, it starts to be a big burden for me to look for keywords every time I write something. So I created a small plugin for Wordpress that suggests keywords for my post using Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Here is a screen shot of the plugin:

RunSEORun Keyword Plugin For Wordpress

RunSEORun Keyword Plugin For Wordpress

After saving your draft, all you have to do is hitting the “Get Keyword Ideas For This Post” button. And plugin starts to ask Adwords Keyword Tool for suggestions. After a while it populates a large list of keywords. Using the ‘Add’ link at the right side of each keyword you can add that keyword as a tag to your post. So in seconds you’ll have some great tags. I also use ‘All In One SEO Pack’. This plugin adds tags to meta keywords automatically. So you’ll have a greate meta-keywords tag in your page.

I didn’t spend much time on this plugin, so it’ll probably be buggy. At least I can say it works perfect on Wordpress 2.6.2. If you like the plugin and face problems in intallation just drop me a comment and I’ll try to help you.

Installation is easy. All you have to do is unpack the tar.gz file under the wp-content/plugins directory and activate the plugin from the admin panel. After that a box will appear under the visual editor.

Important Note: On your server you have to enable PHP curl extension. Most probably it’s enabled by default, so you don’t have to worry. Another point is with the cookie jar file. An empty file named ‘cookies’ will be under the plugin directory. You have to make sure that this file is writable by your web server.

Just give it a try. I’d love to hear your comments.

Download RunSEORun Keyword Plugin tar.gz File

Download RunSEORun Keyword Plugin zip File

What Actually Affects Search Result Rankings?

September 26th, 2008 • seo
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Google Search Results For RunSEORun

Google Search Results For RunSEORun

Good morning my dear blog,

I start my day with a cup of tea - yeah, not coffee - and a query. Tea was good and search results was confusing. Trully they were not confusing but I need a way to attract my reader, sorry. Anyway I got 8 search results as can be seen in the screen shot that I’ve provided. After I checked Reader and marked a couple of posts as read - without reading them of course - , I started to think about rankings of my posts. You know me, I can’t start to think unless I check my Reader account. I asked my self “How Google decide that ‘Hi There!‘ is important than my previous check point post?”. And continued enjoying my cup of tea.

Ok, ok I’ll go into the subject directly. Here are some thoughts on search engine rankings of my posts and how Google decide that one of my posts is better than others. These are just thoughts, not facts.

After all, I’m really confused now. It seems that;

  • Creating fresh content will bring you high rankings immediately.
  • However, this will not last too much. After a while you will lost your importance that you gain due to freshness.
  • Actual importance comes from external links (External sites link to your page)
  • Internal linking (trackbacks etc.) and giving some links (to external sites) are also important.
  • Content of your post is important.

So the conclution is “If you create fresh and high quality content (that contains images, links to external sites and links to your other posts) and some (external) sites links to your content than you’ll get traffic“.

Ok, I got it.

Use Semantic Coding (Semantic Markup)

September 23rd, 2008 • seo
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I believe semantic coding (or semantic markup) is an important issue for search engine optimization that should always be in your mind when you design your web site.

It’s not a big deal, you can view semantic coding as a good programming practice. Like “Don’t use ‘goto’” sentences that you hear from everybody while starting to learn programming. The aim is to use correct tags to be more descriptive about the information contained in a web site. There is always more than one way to render something using HTML, but it’s important to choose the more descriptive markups in order to help search engines understand your content. Here is an example:

“<b>bold text</b>”  will produce “some bold text”

“<strong>bold text</strong>” will produce “some bold text”

To print some bold text on your screen you can use the above markups or any other way (defining styles etc.). However there’s something that “strong” tag will say to search engines that others won’t: The text rendered in bold is important. So use strong tags whereever you want bold text.

H (heading) tags are great examples of semantic coding. Normally putting the title of your page between appropriate H tags will inform search engines about important sentences in your content, in other words they will give an idea about the topic of web page. So it’ll be wise to use H1, H2, H3… tags whereever possible. But try to use only one H1 tag per page since search engines expect the heading of the page to be given between H1 tags — and one page normally will have one heading. For sub sections use H2, H3 etc.

Another important semantic markup is ul, li series. When you list some items, use them instead of any other markup.

I think you got the idea. So no need to go over all the tags (I have to go home now :)) So I’ll give you the list. You can go over the list by yourself: h1, h2, h3…, strong, em, ul, li, p, abbr, acronym, cite, code, ol, dfn.

I guess I forgot some :)

A New Traffic Source: Image Search

September 22nd, 2008 • 3 comments seo
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Google Image Search Results For Russell Crowe

Google Image Search Results For Russell Crowe

It’s said that about %15 of total search volume comes from image search. Whether it’s true or not, image search will have a great impact on your traffic if you include a couple of optimized images. After your images indexed by search engines you’ll see more visitors came from image search. Probably you’ll see lines like (http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=<image url>&imgrefurl=<your url>&….. ) in your analytics results.

Image search optimization requires much less effort than normal search engine optmization, since there’s not much work to do. Here is a check list for image search optimization:

  • Name your images properly: There’s only a couple of ways that you can provide some description about your images to search engines. One is the image name. It’s very important to name your images properly. You should always use some descriptive keywords (holiday.jpg) rather than a set of weird characters (DC00001.jpg). Also consider providing multiple word names where words are separated by a hyphen(-) and not by a underscore (_). a-green-tree.jpg is much better than a_green_tree.jpg, agreentree.jpg or DC00001.jpg. As a general note, do not over use this. Use no more than 4 hyphens.
  • Use proper ‘alt‘ attribute for your images: Another way to provide some description is providing some text in alt attribute of img tag. Always fill alt attributes, do not leave them empty. I repeat, do not over use this too. A not too short and not too long alt with words correctly spelled would be perfect. I prefer to use 4-10 word sentences as alt tag, but at least one word would be good too.
  • Text before and after the image: This is the last chance for you to provide a clue about your image. Search engines will use the text around your images as description. So spend some words to describe your image.
  • Use high quality images (high resolution): Most search engines will prefer high quality images, so it’s important to use high resolution images.
  • Original Content: Original content is always valuable. If you have a tree image just use that, do not find one on the internet. Of course there’s no harm in using that but using a unique image is a better idea then using an image that has already been listed in thousands of sites.
  • Share Your Images: You can share your images on sites like Flickr and Picasa. But do not forget to put a link to your site.
  • Robots.txt: Make sure that robots can reach the directory where your images are stored.
  • Google Webmaster Tools: Check the “I would like to enable enhanced image search on my site and am authorized to opt into this advanced service.” option under the “Tools > Enhanced Image Search” menu in Google Webmaster Tools.

Have I missed something? Probably. But anyway, this list will be a good starting point for you. Just try to put some images on your site and you’ll see it’s benefits in a short time. Of course you can change the above list a little and use some popular keywords in alt attributes, image names etc. That could help as well. Also you can see how well your images do for a specific keyword by using the ’site:’ query parameter in Google. Try this: site:runseorun.com Russell Crowe. Oh no results! May be one day I’ll get some.

Russell Crowe Is A SEO Freak!

September 21st, 2008 • 2 comments general, seo
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Gladiator

Gladiator

It’s 2 a.m. and I’m watching Galdiator on tv. Actually I’ve already seen that movie about ten times. It’s hard to find something more interesting at these hours, that’s why it’ll be eleven from now on. No harm in making it eleven.

As you may guess Galdiator or Russell Crowe has nothing to do with search engine optimization, at least not related to any seo technique that I’ve known. But eventually due to this post everyone that will search Russell Crowe on Google will come to my blog one day - yes, I really believe that. So we can conclude that Russell Crowe himself is a seo technique that will draw traffic to your web site, I swear. You see, I was wrong saying that Russell Crowe has nothing to do with search engine optimization. Ok, I’ll shut up.

Tonight I noticed that my blog has been included to Google index. Not as I expected but at least now I have some pages indexed. It seems that Google bots have visited my blog the day I wrote my first post. So they took only that post. Now I’m waiting for the bots to crawl my sitemap and include all my pages to google index. After that - hopefully - I’ll get some traffic from search engines. For now I’m ok with StumbleUpon traffic. In fact, I noticed that someone has favorited my blog on StumbleUpon. Thanks a340 for the fav, that just made me happy :)

Now, let’s go back to Gladiator.

Increase Your Web Site Traffic Using Social Bookmarking Tools: Del.icio.us

September 19th, 2008 • seo
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Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us

After I’ve submitted RunSEORun to StumbleUpon, just in a couple of hours I started to get some hits :) So, all those SEO articles about StumbleUpon weren’t wrong at all. For now I’ll just stop at this point and not focus on StumbleUpon. A more in depth work will be crucial for StumbleUpon later. Tonight I’ll introduce my dear blog to Del.icio.us, another social bookmarking site. I don’t expect any traffic from Del.icio.us unless I share my blog link with some people on site. Since Del.icio.us uses “nofollow” attribute in anchors listing your site to these tools will not increase your PageRank directly. But hey, this blog is totally for experiments. There is no harm in trying everything.

Since I’ve thousands of visitors from StumbleUpon, I can talk to my visitors from now on :)

Add RunSEORun to Del.icio.us

Add RunSEORun to Del.icio.us

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