When was the last time you looked at your blog feed in a feed aggregator and viewed your site in the same way that your readers do. To ensure you deliver a good customer experience this should be a regular practice, it can also highlight issues with your site that you may not have noticed.

If your feeds are set to full text Read the rest of this entry »

The forums are awash with comments concerning the status and impact of the Google Big Daddy update. Whilst Google is pursuing this to improve their infrastructure and the returned search results the implementation seems to be having an adverse impact on many online businesses.

Search results have become random. Some sites Read the rest of this entry »

Mambo is a good open source content management system and is used by many webmasters. The package itself tries to support seo, search engine optimisation, efforts and it is able to produce search engine friendly url’s.

Unfortunately there is a hidden problem which many people may not be aware of.
Read the rest of this entry »

As Google states “Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and obtain detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google”

This is obviously a significant advantage for a webmaster running a search engine optimiation program on their site. Information direct from Google on how the site has been crawled and where the problems are.

Unfortunately for you to access the full information Google needs to verify that you are the operator of the site and this is not always easy although there is a simple solution.
Read the rest of this entry »

Google adsense revenue is 78.5 percent of advertisers payments according to an article in the New York Times today, 16 January.

This is hot news as Google has not been keen to disclose adsense commission structures before and this has held back some sites from participating in the program. The costs of Internet Marketing with Pay Per Click programs is known but why join the publishing club when you have no idea of what the rewards will be and whether you will be fairly remunerated.

The article further states Read the rest of this entry »

Google sitemaps are google’s way to allow a webmaster to submit all their siteURLs to the Google index and be able to view detailed reports about the visibility of their website pages on Google.

Further to this the sitemaps can be updated and keep Google aware of all the pages in the site and, most importantly, when changes are made to specified pages to help improve the efficiency of the Google visits to the site and subsequent indexing.  The goal is to improve your search engine optimisation activities.

In the last few years Read the rest of this entry »

Link popularity flows from the number and quality of sites that link to you. The link value can be further enhanced by the anchor text used and the use of keywords in the anchor text is better still.

Insertion of your url in comments and trackback is regularly suggested for link popularity improvement in the blog world but I fear that this is out of date advice.

Following previous abuse of this opportunity Read the rest of this entry »

Link popularity is a measure of how many sites link to your site. This positively influences your search engine ranking in the natural search results.

So the question is how can you encourage other sites to link to you?

If you have a site with rich functionality and excellent content this may happen naturally but when you start out you have no online status and hence no queue of sites wanting to link to you. Read the rest of this entry »

You now have regular search engine bot visits and your blog is on the search engine map, what next ?

You now need to direct the bot to the pages in your main web site with your best keyword rich content to ensure that they are indexed. Make sure that the code is clean and your pages are ready for indexing.

If you are in that position create a within page link from your blog article to the page you want indexed. An example is below, note that the link is not just a url but has Read the rest of this entry »

XHTML compliant code. Ok you have read about that and agree that your code should at least be syntax correct to stand a chance of a high search engine ranking.

So how do you go about validating your site html code?

Well fortunately there are several web sites which will do this for you.

Check out http://validator.w3.org/ and be prepared for some surprises.

Is your code correct or does your developer need to do some rework?