How does your site look to the Search Engine Bots?

Let's start with defining what a search engine bot is...

Search engines rely on automated software agents called spiders, crawlers, robots and bots. These bots are information seekers on the Internet.

For search engines to be able to index information they need this tool to visit the websites. They navigate the Web site, figure out what the Web site is about and then add the data to their index. Search engine bots have the ability to follow links, gather information and report back to the engines. If it does its job properly, then the search engine has a good, valuable database, or index, and will deliver relevant results to a visitors query.

Having a successful Web site factors in many variables. One thing we all need to concentrate on is making sure the search engine bots are finding what they are looking for when visiting our site. Search bots are looking for two major things when they spider a site - text & links.

Being able to give the bots what they are looking for truly will increase a Web sites success in the long run.

If you want to see what the bots see try this cool program called Spider Viewer.
http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/spider-test/

What Is A Vertical Search?

Many people have no idea what a vertical search is or even how to find one. If you go to Google and look at the top of the page you will see a list of Vertical Search Engines listed like this: Web -Images - Video - News - Maps - Gmail - more ▼

Often a vertical search is referred to as a specialized search or a specialty search. In Google if you choose to search for a specific topic in a “vertical search” you are only searching against the sites listed within that specific category. In a regular search in Google you use a “horizontal search” which searches against a wide spectrum of information in Google’s database.

Here is an example:
Looking for information on a bass guitar? Search on “bass” in a horizontal search (regular search) in Google and you may get information about the fish bass. Use Google’s Vertical Search -“Products” and you get more relevant information on bass guitars.

You will start noticing that Google will be mixing in results from its vertical search with regular searches now that they have launched the Google Universal Search.

Don't Catch Yourself in a Duplicate Content Penalty

Did you know that Google will penalize your site if they think your have multiple domains containing the same content?

There is an easy fix for mistaken duplicate content. First, you need to be sure your site does not have multiple URLs pointing to the same domain. Google will penalize your rankings if they see two exact sites pointing to the same URL. For example; Google’s views the URL http://www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com as two separate URLs which can get your site penalized for duplicate content.

To easily fix this you can manipulate your .htaccess file and redirect all domains to your main URL. This will automatically redirect any address to the main URL.

Second, you can add the following code to your .htaccess file
(change the "yoursite" to your domain):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

Easy as that and you are back in Google's good graces!

What is Google's Personalized Search?

Back in February Google rolled out it's new Personalized Search Results. What this actually means is your search history is now recorded every time you are logged into your Google Account. If you use Gmail, AdWords, AdSense, Groups, or Alerts, you will automatically be shown search results tailored to your past search history. By default Google will be adding Personalized Search functions to all new accounts.

For example, if you are searching for 'bass fishing' and have searched for 'South Carolina' before, the first few search results will show you 'bass fishing in South Carolina'. This helps in reducing the number of search results and is most likely to provide you the most relevant searches in the shortest possible time.

You can see non-personalized results by logging out of your Google account or you can turn Google's personalized web search results off by adding &pws=0 to the URL of your search query.

So how does this effect Search Engine Optimization? As SEO's we strive to create quality content for a good user experience so our optimization methods will fit right into Google Personalized Search Results. There is a wonderful article on Search Engine Land by Nick Wilson that talks about some SEO methods we are going to need to start thinking about when it comes to optimizing for personlaized searches, read the article:

Optimization Practices for Google Personalized Results

Beware! No Cloaking or Doorway Pages

Lets start by saying both of these practices are listed in Google's Webmaster Guidelines as things to avoid. If Google flags your site for using one of these techniques your Web site will be banned from its index...so beware!

Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content to the user then what is shown to the search engine. A good example of this would be showing straight html text to the search engine but then presenting a Flash generated page to the user.

Doorway Pages are pages that are specifically designed for the search engines. An example could be a page that contains hundreds of links that are of no use to the visitor. If you have a number of links to share with your visitor be sure to organize them in groups and break them up in a number of pages (ideally less than 100 per page). They also can be spotted as stand alone pages that normally do not fit into the actual navigation of the site. Most often these pages reside on a separate IP as the original site.

One of the most important things to remember in order to stay out of trouble with Google is to create content rich text pages that includes relevant keywords to your subject matter. There is no need to try to sneak something by the search engines they give us plenty of opportunity to get well ranked pages as long as we follow their guidelines.

You can find a complete list of Googles guidelines here:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Have You Found Yourself in Google's Sand Box?

If you have a new site and are still not showing up in Google's results you may want to see if you have landed in the "sandbox" .

You can check to see if Google has indexed any of your pages by typing in site:yourdomainname.com into a Google search box. If no page results are found then you have landed yourself in the sand.

Being placed in the Google's Sandbox is like being on probation. New sites are put in the box to discourage spam sites from rising to the top to quickly. Usually sites that are competing for highly competitive keywords will find themselves lost in the sand for a few weeks to a few months. The normal is 3 to 4 months.

Your best plan of attack to crawl out of the sand is to spend this time building links from highly authoritative relevant sites. There are a couple directories which Google still considers important – Yahoo!, GoGuides and the Open Directory Project, also known as DMOZ.org. Getting your site listed on one of these directories will certainly help. You also need to spend this time adding rich industry related content to your site.

The best advise we can give you is to make certain your site is complelty spam free when developing it. Make it as search engine friendly as possible and you may never have to worry about digging your site out of the sand!

Learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Improve Search Engine Rankings

Web site owners are taking advantage of specialized training in search engine optimization to improve their overall search engine rankings. Web site owners are finally realizing that they need to completely understand how the search engines work and exactly what they are looking for if they want their Web site to be competitive on the Internet.

Most business owners know that there are many Certified Search Engine Optimizers that they can hire to perform SEO services for them, but most of the time funding is not always readily available and the time to act is now if they want to start seeing some results quickly. Taking full control of their Web site rankings and not having to rely on someone else to do it for them is a real eye opener into how simple search engine placement can be to achieve.

To learn SEO one does not have to be overly technical they just need to have basic Web page creation skills and the desire to learn how to apply the latest search engine marketing principles and strategies to increase their Web sites visibility.

Being able to learn what is needed to gain top positions on Google, MSN and Yahoo! is very exciting to any business owner who relies on the Internet to increase revenue.

Read the rest of the artcile here: http://www.searchengineacademysc.com/seo_marketing_articles/learn-seo.htm