Posts Tagged ‘search engine’

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.

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

Is Stumbleupon A Good Traffic Source?

September 19th, 2008 • 1 comment seo
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Stumbleupon
Stumbleupon

StumbleUpon is a great service to get discovered. With correct set of actions you can direct a reasonable amount of traffic to your website. At least most of SEO articles says like that. Now it’s time to test for me. Hope it’ll work.

For now I’ve only added RunSEORun to StumbleUpon. I expect actual traffic to come after some social work I’ll make on StumbleUpon. Since it’s a social bookmarking tool, making friends and getting reviews of your page will be of great use.

I’ll share the results soon.

Add To StumbleUpon

Technorati And Other Ping Services

September 18th, 2008 • 1 comment seo
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Technorati

Technorati

Search engine submission has completed. Let’s move to next stage: ping services. Ping services are important especially for blogs. They keep track of content changes. What you have to do is ping a server when you write something. After that ping, services like Technorati will visit your site to fetch the changes. Normally wordpress has default ping support. After you write a post it’ll automatically ping the servers you’ve specified. Wordpress pings Pingomatic after changes and Pingomatic pings several public ping services like Weblogs.com, FeedBurner and Technorati.

It’s a good idea to claim your blog on Technorati. By claiming your blog, you will be able to follow the reactions of your blog: How many favs have you got? How many sites have given a link to you? etc…

I’ve added RunSEORun.com to Technorati. Here is the link: RunSEORun @Technorati.

Search Engine Submission

September 18th, 2008 • seo
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Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer

Live.com Webmaster Center

Live.com Webmaster Center

After submiting RunSeoRun to Google Webmaster Tools, it’s time to submit to some other search engines too. I’ve not directly add my url to Google, using their “Add Url To Google” link, since there is no need to do it after submitting my sitemap.xml. There are many services that you can use to submit your url to several search engines, but truly I don’t believe that they affect much. Always I make sure that Google, Yahoo and Live.com crawls my site and don’t care about other search engines. Both Yahoo and Live.com has services like Google Webmaster Tools. None of them are as useful as Google Webmaster Tools. But at least they give you an oportunity to submit your sitemap.xml.

To use these services, again you have to verify your site. There must be a generic way to verify that a site is yours, every tool requires a different action. I hate that wierd meta tags. Anyway, I submitted my sitemap.xml to Yahoo Site Explorer and Live.com Webmaster Center too. From now on, I’ll host some other spiders.

Sitemap.xml And Google Webmaster Tools

September 17th, 2008 • 1 comment seo
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Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools

After setting up permalinks and correcting meta-tags it’s time to build a sitemap for my lovely blog which already has thousands of visitors every day. Sitemaps are great tools to help search engines discover the pages on your site. If you don’t have a sitemap yet, consider building one. You can find some detailed explanation about sitemaps on Google’s Webmaster Help Center. Again for Wordpress we have a great plugin: Google Sitemap Generator. For those who haven’t got a clue about what this plugin does from it’s name: This plugin generates a google sitemap. Surprising, isn’t it? Anyway, I’ve downloaded this plugin from this link and activated from my admin panel. And got my first sitemap.xml file. So what am I gonna do this file? Yep, Google Webmaster Tools. Google provides a set of very useful tools that you can use to analize your web site. It provides feedback about crawl issues, meta-tag issues, index status etc. I’m planning to write a detailed post about webmaster tools. I verified RunSEORun.com on Google Webmaster Tools and submitted my sitemap.xml. All I can do for now is to wait Google spiders to crawl my blog. Hope it’ll not took much.

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