Pro-SEO

Matt cutts recently had another grab bag where webmasters can submit questions, and he answers them. In case you didn't know, Matt cutts is a google employee so for him to take personal time and spend it not only informing webmasters of google changes but also answering their question is a pretty nice thing for him to do.

Matt cutts latest grabbag was done with a difference, Instead of posting his answers on his blog he decided to make a video of himself answering them, not only is it easier for him to do, It's nice for his fans to watch. It gives us a video SEO tutorial from a google employee! Nice one matt.

Links to matt's videos were posted on his blog, But Pro-SEO thought it would be cool to post them all in one place, So here they are.

Matt Cutts Video #1 | Matt Cutts Video #2 | Matt Cutts Video #3

Qualities of a good site

Myths, Large Site Launches, and Google Images

Optimize for Search Engines or Users?

Static vs. Dynamic urls

"I want to make more money from Adsense!". Really? Me too. In this post we will discuss a few Adsense Tools that will help you make the most from your adsense campaign.

I don't use all of these adsense tools, But they are tools i have heard about and thought i would share them. These aren't in any sort of order.

• Advert Comparison Tool - This adsense tool will allow you to compare how adverts will look from various PPC providers such as YPN and Chitika with different color formats, And will also be able to give you an idea of what kinds of adverts will likely to be displayed on your website.
• Adsense Earnings Calculator - This adsense tool doesn't do anything you couldn't do yourself with a calculator, But it makes it easier. It is a tool that can, After you type in your CTR, Impressions, CPM and some other info, Tell you what you will be likely to earn though adsense over a period of time. It's a good tool for finding out if it's worth displaying adverts on your site or not.
• Domain Blacklist - This adsense tool will be able to generate a list of domains you should block through your competitive ad filter. After telling the tool what type of site you run it will then give you a list of domains that pay very little for clicks. These sites are generally sites that will bid on very low cost keywords and link to MFA sites.
• Adsense Sandbox - This adsense tool is from digitalpoint, It will be able to tell you what kinds of adverts will be displayed in your adsense blocks based on keywords. This can be used in conjunction with other tools to get an idea about what you will get per click.
• Adsense preview - This tool is from google.com and is similar to the adsense sandbox tool. It will be able to give you an idea about what types of adverts you will get based on keywords.
• Adsense Earnings Notifier - We already covered this tool in the webmaster firefox extensions
• Competitive Filter - This is a part of your adsense account. If you are serious about your online business you will need to learn how to use the competitive filter. It will let you block your competition from advertising on your site and it will also allow you to block low paying domains from advertising on your site.
• Search Tracker - This tool will let you keep track of how many times a specific search is made. It will be able to tell you how many times a keyword or phrase is searched for. you will have to sign up to use this, But i have heard good things about it.
• Overture Bidding Tool - This tool will be able to give you suggested keywords and an estimation on thier cost. While overture isn't the same as adsense it will be able to give you an idea and the price is similar on all CPC engines. Handy for designing your site with high paying keywords in mind.
• Heat Map - Probably the most important thing on this page. If you pay attention to only one of these adsense tools make it the google adsense heat map. The heat map will shoow you where to place your adverts on the page to get them performing at thier best. By doubling your CTR you are basicaly doubling your adsense earnings.

post, But it's worth mentioning here too. This adsense tool will display your current adsense earnings in your firefox status bar. Much easier than keep loging into adsense.

Labels: adsense, tools

We will have seen an increase in Slurp activity on our websites in the last few days/weeks as yahoo gives their new spider bot a run out along side the old one before completely retiring the old Slurp bot.

It has taken some time for yahoo to ensure their new bot functions as expected which has meant increased Yahoo spidering and an increase in Slurp activity.

David Simpson and Priyank Garg have been discussing the new Spider bot on the Yahoo! Blog

In addition to crawling the Internet faster, our new crawler is more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, site owners will notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler.

Now, with the new crawler in full production, we have turned off the old crawler and site owners should see a much lower crawl load without a loss in content coverage.

With this change of behavior in the crawler, you may see some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index and some changes in ranking as well.

As with any changes search engines make to the way they spider/index websites we may start seeing some changes to SERPS in the yahoo index, So webmasters should start monitoring where they appear in the Yahoo search, Especially for search terms they previously ranked well for.

The expected efficiency of the new spider bot should be welcomed when webmasters start seeing a reduced bandwidth bill. Though the effect it has on indexing time and SERPS may put a dampener on those savings.

The Korean Yahoo labs have been busy developing and releasing their new service titled Webzari. Webzari Is a tool for visualizing the weight of inbound links to any web page. Though the interface does at first seem a little childish it proves to be quite a powerful tool for checking your backlinks (IBL) weight on the Yahoo search engine and has the ability to save the results in Yahoo social bookmarking service..

Webzari is currently only available in Korean which make navigating it sometimes difficult, Though as a whole it is fairly intuitive.

Part fun and part useful Webzari looks set to be a hit -Though mostly with webmasters- and we will almost certainly see more features in the future, Such as more stats on the sites linking to you, better visualization icons which will convey information without text and no doubt an English version.

"Swarms" and "clouds" seem set to replace the conventional "list" style of conveying information in order of importance with digg setting the pace with their Stack and swarm visualization method.

If you use Webzari and have some comments or suggestions the Yahoo blog is looking for Feedback so you can go there after you have commented on it here ;)

Online security and protection of information are serious issues on the internet. Some people will say "well, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about", though i doubt they would retain that attitude if you had a look round their house while they were on holiday and then defended you actions with "well, you don't have anything to hide, do you?" implying that someone's desire to keep private information private some how suggests guilt of some sort.

A discussion was raised on the WMT forum a week or so ago regarding the information that Google collect through their adsense ad blocks. It's understandable that they will collect information on the owner of the site and the people who click the adverts, but what information do they collect on the people who just view the adverts? Google are in a powerful position. They have adsense adblocks on millions of websites across the internet, and as these adverts are served with JavaScript it allows them to collect all sorts of information on anybody who views them, Everything from the referring URL to the persons screen resolution.

But what if they are also able to collect information like your age, your gender, Your address, Your Email address, Your interests or what job you do? Would that count as an invasion of privacy? As a search engine who make their money exclusively through advertising this amount of information would be priceless to Google when it comes to finding out what sorts of people view what sites and what sorts of people click what adverts.

If we have a look through the JavaScript file that is responsible for delivering adverts to your browser (pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js) we see a number of worrying variables.
In this JavaScript file the following items deserve special attention;

1. google_cust_gender - This appears to be collecting gender, What do boys like and what do girls like,, valuable info.
2. google_cust_interests - This seems to somehow collect what your interests are, Perhaps this is cross referenced with other sites you have visited, which are also collecting information.
3. google_cust_id - It's hard to know exactly what this would get, But i would guess it's either your Google account name, Or your Gmail address.
4. google_cust_job - Why would google need to know what job you do? Ah, yes that's right, So they can track what you do and where you go and build up a database of what doctors do, How much porn school teachers look at and how many hours the unemployed are online for.
5. google_cust_age - Finally we have your age. An important statistic when it comes to figuring out key demographics.

So, Now we have had a look at the types of things Google may be looking for, Let's think about how they could gather this information. Afterall, You can't just put "get_me_job" in some JavaScript and expect it to get the information for you.

Your Google Account

The first and most obvious way of getting this information would be to use your google account or your Gmail account. If you are logged in at the time of viewing the advert it would be possible for Google to get this information from your account and then report it to adsense.

The Google toolbar

I believe the google toolbar is the most widely used toolbar with versions for every operating system and most browsers. So with this piece of software installed on your computer, and millions of others, it wouldn't be too difficult for google to gather the information from your profile, Or even go looking round your computer for it and store it ready to report to adsense whenever asked. Admittedly it would be quite "evil" if google were to go hunting around your computer for this information so i doubt they take this approach, Like everything in this post, It isn't a definite certainty, Only a possibility.

I am by no means an expert at JavaScript and personally im not even a fan of it. So if someone else could get to the bottom of these strange vars in the adsense JavaScript file i would appreciate if you could post your findings, Maybe we can get to the bottom of this.

Do Adsense image adverts pay more than text ads? A question most webmasters have asked at some point, even if it was to themselves. There is no official line from google (who like to keep quiet about what Adsense ads pay) about whether image ads pay more than text ads, or visa versa. Though Google do say this;

While we can't make any guarantees about the earnings potential of image or text ads, we believe that image ads will prove to be a high-performing option for publishers looking to monetise their pages. In fact, we show image ads when they have a higher value to you than the corresponding set of text ads that might otherwise run in the same slot.

So it looks like the Google position on it is that Adsense image ads should pay more than text ads but they can't guarentee anything. To me it makes sense that image ads should pay more than text ads, and heres why. If an image ad is displayed it means no other adverts will be displayed in that adblock, So Adsense should select the highest paying advert to display in that block.

Personally i prefer adsense image ads, as a publisher and as an advertiser.
As a publisher i want my Adsense adverts too be interesting and eye catching, Image ads do this. Advertisers work hard on creating an image that makes people want to click it, which in turn benifits me.
I like to place the adverts in places people look, Like at the top of my page and also in places where people will be looking for something new to do, Like underneath my articles or content. The theory is that someone will read the page then think "what can i do now?", so if thhere is an eye catching interesting image right infront of them they will be likely to click it.

As an advertiser i like Adsense image ads because, Like they say, An picture says a thousand words. You can easily get accross what type of company you are by designing your image ads well. You can also imprint your logo into the minds of people, And this wont cost you a penny. I'm sure most of you have seen the adverts for the "SEO Book", You all know what it is and you all know the logo, But how many of you have ever clicked the advert or even been to the site? Not many i would bet. Yet the idea and the imagery have been imprinted in your minds and it hasn't cost them a penny.

So my advice would be use text adverts where you have to, and image adverts at all other times. Because even if image adverts don't physically pay more per click (though they should) they will increase your CTR because they are eye catching.

According to Matt Cutts google have added support for the NOODP META Tag.

In some circumstances Google have used a websites description taken from the ODP (dmoz) entry as the description in the SERPS, This has confused and sometime angered webmasters. The thing is, The internet and our websites are fluid and ever changing, Something which the ODP is not. By adding the NOODP META Tag you can now instruct Google to not use the dmoz description in SERPS.

At present the only major engines supporting the NOODP META Tag are MSN and Google. Yahoo use the description from their own directory in their SERPS, So it is unlikely that they will implement the NOODP META Tag, Or bring out a meta tag that allows webmaster to stop them using the description found in the yahoo directory.

If you want to add the NOODP META Tag to your site to prevent Google using your dmoz description in SERPS add the following code to the head of your page

<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

Of course, You wont need to do this if your site isn't listed in dmoz and you wont have to do it if google don't currently use your dmoz description, But there is no harm in adding it anyway.

Matt Cutts recently added this to his blog as a bit of an experiment and he found that it took effect 3 to 4 days after his page was crawled.

For some time it has been accepted that the MSN search engine is the easiest of the big three (Yahoo, Google, MSN) to rank well in early. But why is it so easy to rank well in MSN? And how do we do it?

Why is it so easy to rank well on MSN?

Ranking well on MSN seems to rely heavily on on-page SEO. This means MSN give great importance to what is on the page as opposed to search engines, like Google, Who give great importance to off page SEO such as backlinks. MSN also don't appear to have a sandbox or ageing delay like Google does, Or if they do have one it's certainly not as devastating or as long as the Google sandbox which can last upto a year. This means if new sites do it right they can jump right to the top of the SERPS on MSN.

How to rank well In MSN?

In this section i am going to list a few things that will help you rank well on MSN, You should be aware that following all of these tips may mean you rank lower in Google and Yahoo, Or disappear altogether, So use your own judgment before committing to ranking well only in MSN. It doesn't make sense to optimize your pages for just MSN.

1. To rank well on MSN make the title of your page the exact term you expect people too search for. MSN pays close attention to the title of the page and if your title is exactly what the searcher searched for you will more than likely turn up on the first page at least.
2. Use H tags. Your H1 tag should be a variation of your title. Try to keep it as close to the title as possible, But not identical. Perhaps use the same words in a different order.
3. MSN seems to be, in my experience, the search engine that pays closest attention to meta tags. So get them keywords and descriptions right. Again, Make them what you think people will be searching for.
4. In the body of your page use bold and underline on 50% of your keywords. Adding emphasis to all of your keywords will look like spam, So only do it to half, And do it mostly to words at the top of the page.
5. Use keywords in URLs, MSN likes keywords in URLs. While not as much importance is placed on keywords in URLs by MSN as they used to, It's still an effective tactic used to rank well in MSN.
6. MSN don't seem to pay attention too how quickly you get backlinks. So where google would penalize you for getting 1000 backlinks in a week, MSN will not.
   

MSN have a much simpler algo compared to google, So with a little experimentation it won't be long before you have a pretty good idea what MSN look for and what you have to do, or not do, to rank well in MSN.
If you think of it as Googles stupider younger brother you wont go far wrong.

The most common questions on webmaster forums are regarding the importance of pagerank and are usually posted by new webmasters who believe that this pagerank value given to their sites must have some importance, and that the value must be an accurate representation of the quality of their site. After all, Google wouldn't give us something pointless, would they?

What i will try to do in this post is try to explain the importance of pagerank, or more precisely the unimportance of pagerank

When pagerank first materialized it was given a lot of weight by google. Out of the 100+ factors that determine SERPS it was probably one of the most important. But as time went on, webmasters started getting all the backlinks they could, Which lead to a lot of spamming and a lot of mess.

Why PageRank Isn't Important.

The most common thing new webmasters have trouble getting their head around is how backlinks can be important, PageRank isn't important, yet backlinks cause pagerank. Thinking about it, it would be confusing. I would most definitely agree that backlinks are an important factor in SEO, Probably the most important factor. But the most important factors in backlinks are the anchor text used in those backlinks and if the site linking to you has related content. Two factors that pagerank doesn't take into account.
So if Pagerank doesn't take into account the two biggest factors of backlinks it can hardly be a reliable way of measuring the success of your link building.

In recent times Google have got pretty good at spotting links from unrelated sites and spammy links to discourage people from overemphasized the importance of pagerank.

A lot of people also assume that sites listed in the SERPS are ordered by pagerank, I don't know where they get this from, and i don't know why they don't see for themselves, it's easy to do, Just do a search. Sites in the SERPS are not ordered by pagerank

So by now you should have a pretty good idea why pagerank isn't as important as it once was.
And as if all that isn't enough, By the time we get to see toolbar pagerank it's four month out of date. So, please, No more questions about pagerank. Measure your sites success by two simple statistics, Visitors and sales, Nothing more.

Yahoo have finally gone live with their beta homepage that was previously located at yahoo.com/preview.
It has come as no surprise really since the beta homepage has been visible since Febuary.

The new homepage certainly has a new look with the addition of AJAX and DHTML and more features that allow the user to customize their yahoo homepage. On the Yahoo blog they have called this "the most significant redesign of the www.yahoo.com home page ever". This will probably be the first time most Yahoo users have encountered AJAX.

It is a little know fact that Yahoo is the biggest website on the internet, With their new Finance Site only adding to this, So it's a logical step that they should redesign their site and incorporate some new features using technology that wasn't available first time round.

Free SEO and Adsense eBooks

Ebooks have become quite popular, Especially in the world of SEO and Adsense where webmasters want to get the best from search engines and want to make the most money from Adsense. Ebooks usually cost money, upto $167 for some (or more), But Pro-SEO have been lucky enough to find you a selection of Free SEO Ebooks and Free Adsense Ebooks to download and we intend to bring you more as we find them. If you have written a free SEO ebook or free adsense ebook (or a paid one you want to give away) contact me and we will include it here for download.

As these SEO and Adsense Ebooks were not written by us we can't vouch for their content, and as always, You should read them with discretion. While not everything you read in ebooks will be true it's always a good idea to get an all round opinion of SEO and Adsense and then making your own mind up.
So far we have been able to get hold of the following free SEO ebooks and free adsense ebooks.

1. Blogging For Profit Ebook - The blogging for profit free ebook gives you a guide for finding that niche blog theme and building it to the stage where it can make you money. I have only skimmed through this free blogging ebook but i looks to give solid advice that every blogger looking to create a profitable blog should read.
2. Free Adsense Ebook - The Free Adsense Ebook is about, You guessed it, Google Adsense. It will give you tips about increasing your CTR and how to select he right adsense colors and adsense positioning to achieve maximum earnings. The writer claims to have increased CTR significantly simply by altering, and monitoring, his adsense colors and position.
3. Overture and Adwords Free Ebook - The free adwords and overture ebook explains to webmasters how to select the right keywords to maximize their CPC campaign. It makes sense that if you are going to pay for clicks you want to pay as little as possible and organize your overture and adwords campaign so that you can maximize profits.
4. SEO Made Easy Free Ebook - The SEO made Easy Free Ebook is a one stop shop, especially for new webmasters, Full of information about the basics of SEO and what you need to do to increase your footprint on the internet. We all know that SEO is the second thing webmasters need to worry about (content being first), So why not read up on it with this free SEO ebook.
5. Adwords Made Easy Ebook - The Adwords made easy ebook explains why so many online businesses throw hundreds of dollars away simply because they don't understand how Google Adwords work. You don't have to make the same mistakes they made, You can bypass the part where you throw money away and go straight to the part where you make money with google adwords. This free adwords ebook explains how to market your site using adwords, How to select your keywords and what to do once you get visitors.
   
6. Basic SEO Ebook - This free SEO book is designed for beginners. Not for advanced SEO folk. But if you are a new webmaster looking to learn the basics of SEO, Give it a read.

Labels: seo

If you don't know, Made for adsense sites, Or MFA sites, Are sites that are created for the sole purpose of display adsense. These MFA sites tend to have little, poor quality content, They are never updated, Created using MFA templates and are covered in adsense. The website owner doesn't want people to learn from their MFA sites, Or to Contribute in a community or forum, They only want them to click their adsense.

Do Made For Adsense Sites Work?

I would try to tell you that made for adsense sites (mfa) don't work, But the truth is, They do work. The vast majority of people browsing the internet have no idea what adsense is and they don't know that when they click that "link" the website owner, and Google, are being paid.
Some people would argue that MFA sites don't hurt anyone, But as with all advertising, somewhere along the line someone is having to pay for that click, And if the advert is on a made for adsense site it logical to assume that they have targeted high paying keywords, so that click could cost the advertiser upto $20, or even more.

What Are The Down Sides To MFA Sites

Apart from costing advertisers money, which in turn means they are less likely to use adsense in the future the negative effects of MFA sites are that they fill the internet up with useless sites that contain no information. I'm sure you, Like many, Have done a search on google and found sites that lack content, Irritating isn't it?

judgment Day For MFA Sites

For some time bloggers have been predicting the impending judgment day for MFA sites. As google takes a positive step towards banning scraped spammy content it's understandable that Made For Adsense Sites will be effected by this spam cull.
It's also worth knowing that MFA sites are against Adsense terms, I for one can't wait until the day when MFA site owners get banned from the google index, and banned from adsense.

It seems there is a pagerank update in progress, But so far the changes seem to be only effecting pages that had zero PR, and any changes in pages that did have PR has seen their PR decrease, As i predicted in This post.

While it is too early to predict what will happen when this PR update has fully rolled out it does appear that, so far at least, Google are dropping pagerank in an attempt to weed out spammy links.

You can view your current pagerank in all data centers by going Here or Here

There have also been a lot of webmasters, Myself included, Reporting that google are showing a reduced number of backlinks when searching link:www.domain.com.

Like i say though, We will have a better idea what google are doing when the PR update has fully rolled out, Pro SEO will keep you posted.

Firefox is a web browser, But surely you must know this..

One of things that has made firefox the success it is, apart from its functionality and security, Is the amount of Firefox extensions there are. The extensions for Firefox are so vast that there are even extensions aimed at webmasters and extensions designed to help with your SEO. What we are going to do in this post is list some of the most useful SEO and webmaster Firefox extensions.

• IE Tab - The IE tab Firefox extension allows you to embed Internet Explorer in Firefox at the click of a button.. This is very handy if you are testing the cross browser compatibility of your website.
• Search Status - The search status extension displays google pagerank and Alexa rank in your Firefox status for you to easily view a sites popularity.
• ColorZilla - The ColorZilla extension allows you to easily find out the color of any element on a webpage. Saves having to look through the source.
• Live HTTP Header - Live HTTP headers lets you see the headers that are sent to and from your browser in real time. Great extension for Web developers.
• switch User Agents - This extension allows you to change the identity of your Firefox browser. Want to know what your website does if you are in opera or IE? You do? Great, then use this Firefox developer extension.
• URLparams - Shows you the GET and POST parameters of the current website in the sidebar.
• DNSStuff Toolbar - With the DNSStuff toolbar you can easily do a domain lookup directly from Firefox.
• HTML Validator - The HTML validator Firefox extension allows you to easily validate your HTML markup, It does require the HTML validator for windows.
• Fire FTP - Fire FTP is an FTP client that runs straight from Firefox.
• Blog This - Adds a blogger's "blog this" function to right mouse click.
• Link Checker - This extension allows you to check the validity of every link on the page.
• X-Ray View - Let's you view how a page was constructed without having to go back and forth between the page and source code.
• CSS Edit - edit the pages CSS from the sidebar of Firefox.
• Customize Google - This handy extension allows you to customize Google. It will remove adverts and provide you with links to other search engines so you can compare results.
• Adsense Notifier - Keep track of your adsense earnings with this Firefox adsense extension by showing earning in the status bar and have it update every 15 minutes.
• SEO Links - This handy Firefox extension will display link popularity on mouseover.
• Niche Watch - This Firefox SEO extension provides you the technical information required to beat your competitor websites in serps.It gives you backlinks number, indexed pages, keyword occurrences on the page and page rank.
• JSView - The JSView Firefox extention allows you to view the source code of JavaScript and external CSS.
• View Source Chart - View source chart Firefox extention allows you to view even the most unorganized html script in a nicely laid out chart. (Thanks Jumpenjuhosaphat)
• Server Spy - The server spy webmaster firefox extension will reveal the server type in your Firefox status.
• Screen Grab - The screen grab Firefox extension will allow you to easily take a screen shot via firefox and save it as an image.
• Codetch - web page editor that has the feel of Dreamweaver. An amazing webmaster Firefox extension for anyone doing web design that doesn't want to fork out a few hundred dollars for Dreamweaver.
• FireBug - an advanced debugger console that lets you monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax scripts in firefox.
• PDF Downloader - Isn't it annoying when you click a link and it turns out to be a PDF file? You have to wait about 3 weeks for acrobat to fire up. With this extension it does not automatically open, It will ask you what you want to do with that file. Either open in acrobat, Save it or view as HTML.
• Linkification - Linkification is a extension for firefox that will convert all text URL's into clickable ones, Saves you having to copy and paste the url into the address bar
• TinyURL Creator - Sometimes long URL's are a pain if you are posting on a forum, In IRC or in an email. With this firefox extension you can easily convert those long URL's into shorter URL's.

This list of Webmaster and SEO Firefox extensions will be updated as time goes by and i find more. If you know of more SEO and webmaster Firefox extensions post them in a reply, Especially if you have written your own SEO, Webmaster or Developer Firefox extension.

Labels: Firefox, seo

Searching has become the second most popular activity online, Email being top.
Because of this optimizing your website for search engines should be number one of every webmasters list of things to do.

To start with you should have a clear set of keywords and keyphrases that you want to optimize your website for.

Search Modifiers

The most common mistake by webmasters is to optimize their site for very short keyphrases, which has two negative effects.
The first negative effect is that it will be harder to rank well for in SERPS and secondly they will not send you visitor's who are likely to make a purchase. Think about it like this. Who is more likely to buy a ipod from you? The person who searches for "ipod" or the person who searches for "black 4 gig ipod nano"? Exactly, The second user, They obviously know what they want, So if your site sells it they are likely to buy it.

The longer your keyphrase is the easier it is to rank well. By adding extra descriptive words (modifiers) to your keyphrases you will have more chance of ranking well and more chance of attracting targeted visitors looking to make a purchase.

Geography and SEO

You should also optimize your website with geography in mind. If you run a catering company that operates in London it wouldn't be worth spending the extra time and money it would take to rank well for "catering" when ranking well for "catering in London" would be both easier and cheaper, Also people looking for catering in London are likely to search "catering in London" and not just "catering".

Brands

optimize your site for brands. Ranking well for "digital cameras" would be very hard, Ranking well for "Kodak 10mp digital camera" would be easier, But ranking well for "buy 10mp digital camera 5x zoom in UK" would be even easier still.

Miispellingss

Google has estimated that 10% of all searches made through them are misspellings. Now, I wouldn't suggest optimizing a whole page for misspellings but it wouldn't hurt to include a couple of spelling variations on your page and in meta tags. Ranking well for a misspelling should be fairly easy, Think about it, Who is going to be optimizing a page for "ipos namo" or "degetal camra", nobody would be, But some people will be searching for it.

By now you should have a good idea of how we can include search modifiers and georaphic targeting to attract more visitors by optimizing our pages for longer phrases and attract the types of visitors who are likely to make a purchase.

I hope this works for you and good luck!

According to the Amsterdam analytics firm onestat The FireFox browser has jumped from a global market share of 8.7% to a whopping 13% since April 2005.


The national usage of firefox make some interesting reading, too, with FireFox making up 16% in the USA, 24% in Australia and a huge 39% in Germany.

Onestat provide visitor statistics for 50'000 websites from 100 countries, The FireFox usage statistics are based on these websites and countries.

It has been known for sometime that the number of FireFox users are growing, Webmasters can see this by looking at their own visitor stats, But these FireFox usage statistics are usually inaccurate as they only represent one websites user base, It's to be expected that a coding or Linux forum would have a higher number of users using FireFox than a more general website such as BBC (which requires WMP to play media) or myspace.

I was asked earlier by a friend how to create a custom 404 error page, So i figured i would write a small tutorial on it.

Why would i want a custom 404 error page?
The main reason for using a custom 404 error page is to add a little personality or humor to something that is, at the end of the day, a mistake on your part. Some people like to include a funny story about why the page is not there, Others prefer the heartfelt apology, But the main thing to include on this 404 error page is a link to your homepage, Which is something a regular 404 error page doesn't include.

First thing you need to do is instruct your server to use a specific page for your custom 404 error page instead of the usual boring page. We do this with an .htaccess file.
If you don't already have an .htaccess file in your root directory, Create one, Then put the following line into it.

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.domain.com/404-error-page.php

Change domain to your domain.
So now you know how to make your server display your custom 404 error message, What should we put on it? This is where your imagination comes in. It is a good idea to keep your error message lighthearted.. If you know PHP you could even make your 404 error message send you an email every time someone gets an error.

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool. It allows your users to save links to your site to their page on their social bookmarking site, then others are able to see what links they have saved and perhaps visit them. Then perhaps they will also add that page to their social bookmarking account.

Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites are Blogmarks, Del.icio.us, Digg, Furl, Google, netvouz, Newsvine, Reddit, Spurl and Technorati..
There are many more, But those are my favorites.

If you look under each of my posts you should see little icons for each of these social bookmarks services. When a user clicks the icon they are able to save that post to the social bookmarking service of their choice..

The social bookmarking button code i am posting will work with blogger straight away, The same code can be used for other blogs but will need to have the appropriate sections changed accordingly..

You will have to figure out where to copy this to in your blogger template based on what template you used, But it should go somewhere under your post, I would recommend directly under the <$BlogItemBody$> tag and will look like this


<a href="http://blogmarks.net/my/new.php?mini=1&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" title="Bookmark This to Blogmarks"><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/84282833.png" alt="Add to blogmarks" height="16" width="16" /></a> <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark This to del.icio.us"><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/80727937.png" alt="delicious" height="16" width="16" /></a> <a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" title="Digg This Story!"><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/89072042.png" alt="digg" height="16" width="16" /></a> <a href="http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&t=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark To Furl"><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/47600014.png" alt="furl" height="16" width="16" /></a> <a href="http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=add&bkmk=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark to Google"><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/10847106.png" alt="google" height="16" width="16" /></a> <a href="http://www.netvouz.com/action/submitBookmark?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>&popup=no" title="Bookmark to Netvouz"><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/47445448.png" alt="netvouz" height="16" width="16" /></a> <a href="http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?u=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&h=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Bookmark to Newsvine" ><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/27563199.png" alt="newsvine" height="16" width="16" /></a> <a href="http://reddit.com/submit?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Add to reddit"><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/10796749.png" alt="reddit" height="16" width="16" /></a> <a href="http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogItemTitle$>" title="Spurl This!"><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/67105361.png" alt="spurl" height="16" width="16" /></a> <a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>" title="Add to Technorati Favorites" ><img src="http://img2.imagepile.net/images/ycc2106/81723336.png" alt="Technorati" height="16" width="16" /></a>

Pro-SEO were notified by someone reading a /. article that eBay have added Google Checkout to their list of banned payment methods (click 'show' next to 'some examples')

So, Why would they do this? The obvious answer is that eBay own paypal and want to limit their competitions influence in the online payment industry. But we can read a lot more into this, It means paypal must be very frightened by the "big dog" that is google stepping in on what has been for some time their turf.

No doubt in a day or two we will get an official reason from eBay (paypal) why they have placed this ban on Google Checkout, It will probably be something along the lines of they think that Google Checkout is new, and as such shouldn't be trusted straight away.
We may also see some legal action from google against eBay for breaking some kind of anti-competition law.

Personally i think eBay have done themselves no favors by publicly announcing that they are terrified of google checkout. It sends the message that they aren't very confident in their own business model.

Update: It has also been noted by a number of SEO and webmaster forums that eBay have also changed the name of the policy from "Safe payments" to "Accepted Payments" could this be a friendly approach so as to not offend Google, Or could it be a strategical one to lessen Googles ability to sue under anti-trust laws?

It's official, According to the McDar Backlink and Google PR update time line this has been the longest time between Google PR updates ever, At 122 days.

18-Feb-06 - 122 days - (as of the 6th of July 2006)
19-Oct-05 - 97 days
14-Jul-05 - 83 days
22-Apr-05 - 111 days
01-Jan-05 - 87 days
06-Oct-04 - 106 days
22-Jun-04 - 22 days
31-May-04 - 38 days
23-Apr-04 - 16 days
07-Apr-04 - 18 days
20-Mar-04 - 38 days
11-Feb-04 - 16 days
26-Jan-04 - 15 days
11-Jan-04 - 18 days
24-Dec-03 - 18 days
06-Dec-03 - 16 days

So what can we get from this extended period since the last PR update? That would be open to individual interpretation, But i think we would all agree that it means there is something going on behind the scenes.

Personally i would think it means Google are trying to take the importance webmasters attach to PR away. There are many factors that make PR flawed, inaccurate and open to abuse, But the biggest factor is that it, in a way, promotes spamming, Spamming such as blog spam and comment spam. PR gives new webmasters the impression that they can rank well in search engines simply by getting thousands of backlinks, No matter how those links were achieved.

By the time the next PR update does come around, I would bet we will see a lot of sites losing PR because of PR algo tweaks google are in the process of doing.

It had come to the attention of a few people that some adsense blocks on some websites contain a section of code like this google_hints="your,keywords,go,here"; , Some discussion was sparked by this, Then a moderator Vangogh had the idea to email google and ask them about this, Best to get it from the horses mouth.

Googles response to the google_hints adsense code question was

Thanks for your inquiry. The feature you're referring to is one of several features the Google AdSense team is currently testing for a very limited number of publishers. At this time, we are not able to offer these features to other publishers. Should we offer these features to additional publishers in the future, we will be sure to notify you at that time. I appreciate your understanding.

It looks to me like they are still beta testing the google_hints code.
personally i don't know if this is a good idea. Adsense is supposed to be contextual, Meaning the adsense bot visits your site, reads the page, and then gives you adverts based around your content, The google_hints adsense code will effectively mean publishers can choose what adverts are being displayed. So if you are currently publishing content that produces adverts that pay 5 cents per click you would be likely to just stick the keywords "asbestos, mesothelioma, cancer, lawyer, compensation" in the google_hints and hope for those elusive $40 clicks. It would mean less clicks, But should mean more earnings.

I believe to make this available to everyone would be a huge mistake by google.

Matt Cutts has recently confirmed a change in the way google index web pages. He tells us that the adsense bot (media bot) will now help the google bot index websites.

The adsense bot (media bot) and the google bot used to have very different and separate roles. The adsense bot would only spider web pages with the purpose of delivering relevant adverts to the adsense blocks, and the google bot would only spider the internet for the google search. Their paths never crossed and their roles were separate.

So what does this change mean for webmasters? Well, not much really, It was mainly done as a way to save bandwidth and matt assures us that being spidered by either the adsense bot or regular google bot will not make a difference in how long it takes for your site to be indexed or where you appear in the SERPS.
This is mainly due to the adsense bot updating only the cache. So Instead of the google bot coming to spider your site to update your cache, It will get the cache update from what the adsense bot retrieved.

Should we be worried? Before all the google scaremongers start telling people that the sky is falling and that google are out to kill us, Don't worry, Unless you are already doing something you shouldn't be this will have no negative effect on your SERPS.
One thing you should be aware of though is that google may penalize you if you are currently serving a different page to the adsense bot and to your visitors.
This is sometimes done by webmasters who want to get relevant or targeted adverts on their page, They would simply show the adsense bot a keyword stuffed page and they would show googlebot and visitors a regular page. This now would be seen by google as cloaking since google bot and the adsense bot share a role.