seo blog

Fewer people are making one word searches in search engines according to OneStat.com and it seems as if there is an increase in the number of three and four words searches. Their stats show that two word searches are still the most common though.

“Search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo can drive a lot of traffic to a web site. It is important that a webmaster or SEO expert knows what kind of search phrases they have to use to drive more traffic to a site.” said Niels Brinkman, co-founder of OneStat.com.

Can using fewer words in your page title make any difference with all these stats in mind? Have a look at these results from Google when listing only the pages from one site. After the main pages (home pages and main categories) and where the site listings start, you will notice that all the sites listed first are the ones that have only one word or no spaces in the title. This tells me that Google for example places more value on pages with fewer words stuffed into the title.

Searching with one word searches usually brings up the main site though, that is if the url and title are almost the identical. As you add more words to the search, so the site you are looking for has more sites challenging for the top position with those addition keywords.

My advice is to target a set of no more than three words on a page and you can start by using one to three words in the page title.

Finally… I have been waiting for this Google PageRank update and it has finally shown some great results for me.

I was happy to see that my directory categories all got PR4 and sub categories got PR3. Most of the site’s details pages that where on the home page also got PR4 which was great for those sites! Just a quick promo for the front page…

I haven’t been as excited as previous updates (well not for a while now), and the reason is that PageRank seems to be losing it’s flavour (still very popular don’t get me wrong), but many SEO consultants don’t value it as it once was. I have read in many places that it is not that important anymore. I still think it plays a big role in the SEO industry though, maybe as a marketing tool.

Something on the horizon though is Page Strength, and it seems to be catching on. Some critics say that it still needs to be tweaked a little, but I think that it gives a slightly wider picture of the value of any web page. The Page Strength tool was created by Matt Inman and Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. Give it a test run!

There are a few areas that I think may not be too relavent for some sites like links from .gov and .edu TLDs and links found in Wikipedia. It also seems to use a lot of Yahoo results. Maybe it would be better if it could use a combination of search engine results? This tool is meant to give you a snapshot along with details. Great work guys!

Will Page Strength be the new PageRank?

Spam is still on the rise and seems to becoming more of a problem for many of my clients. I am being asked more and more about was to stop spam. Anyway, this blog wasn’t meant to be about spam, but it is slightly related…

Now and then an email about my bank details slips through my basic filters. I can see from a mile away that it is a fake bank email for a number of reasons. One, I don’t bank at this bank and two, all the links point to a website that isn’t the bank’s real site.

Occasionally, I have nothing better to do, which is not that often, and I actually follow the link, log in and fill in the forms. All with fake details of course; usually something like Earl Hickey… I did this today and was surprised to see that this…

I thought that this was such a great warning and a great service to all those people that were genuinely caught out and didn’t realise that the email was a fake. This must be the Google plugin for Firefox?! If anyone knows, please inform us.

Just announcing that I am going to be starting a “Site of the Month” Competition to show off quality sites that are submitted to The 100 Lists Web Directory.

Just some simple guidelines/rules: I will be checking for good looking sites to start with (most important, well… one of the main points). The site must comply with W3C Standards and the CSS file (should be using one!) must also validate. I am sure that I will come up with some more rules as we go alone…

So to enter this competition, simply submit your site to the directory.

At this stage, winners will get $3 added to their listing. Small yes, but will get the site to the top of their category or close to it.

Google has launched Google Checkout and upon initial inspection there have been some positive feedback.

This recent launch is bound to be competition for the 3rd party payment companies that are out there. Even though it is reported that Google claims that they are not aiming to compete with companies like PayPal, with a few more features and facilities they will definitely be a player.

At this stage, Google are only catering for the US and are sure to roll it out to the rest of the world soon.

I think that it is about time that there was another big company to provide a bit of competition! Their fees and charges are low and are even lower if you use Google Adwords.

Is Google trying to increase their revenue intake by subtly altering the default border of the Adsense advertisements?

I got an email from Google saying:

“Your ads currently display the default Google color palette, Seaside (formerly known as Mother Earth). In the near future, we plan to update the default palette to Open Air, a new palette containing the same set of colors, but without the blue border. We’ve found that many publishers prefer the cleaner look of this palette and have also seen that a blended color palette performs better for them — attracting user interest while still maintaining the distinction between ads and content with the ‘Ads by Google’ label.” - Google’s email

Well I guess the email does say that they are aiming to increase ad performance, but they are using the reason that “publishers prefer the cleaner look” instead of “we want more money”. Wouldn’t Google get more out of this than anyone else?

Everyone knows that the more the advert blends in with the page the higher the click rate will be for that ad. I have found that having the border colour the same as the background and advert colour increases the click rate. Surely Google knows this too and has made a decision to default the border to the same colour as the background of the ad in order to increase revenue.

A high percentage, of what I have noticed, of Adsense users use the default colours for their ads. I am sure Google is taking advantage of this fact. I am not sure of the exact firgures, but Google must stand to making millions from this small change!

What do you think?