One of our good friends Chris at RedHotFranchises.com let us know that he recently launched his new site so we decided to check it out. It is very informative and easy to navigation while providing a ton of Franchise Information. If you have considered starting your own business, go with a proven business model and it will increase your chances of success.
Ten SEO tips taken from Matt Cutts at Wordcamp 2007
• Supplemental results are determined mainly by page rank.
• Try to keep the number of URL parameters low.
• Fill in alt tags. 3-4 words.
• For search engines, dashes in the URL are nice.
• Google looks at categories, sidebars, navigation things on side.
• Use categories that are also good keywords.
• Use the keywords in the content somewhere. Look natural.
• Get the keywords more closer in the title.
• Be sure your site is crawlable.
• Standardize backlinks (www. vs. non-www).
These are your basic whitehat seo optimization techniques. If you were looking for wordpress seo optimization click here.
Netflix is offering a prize of $1,000,000 to whomever can increase the productivity of their Cinematch system by 10%. Cinematch groups movies into “clusters” drawn on ratings provided by Netflix users. Based upon an algorithm designed by a now Google employee, the system bears a resemblance to the Google algorithm which groups websites into similar neighborhoods connected by links. Another internet contest, Globalwarming awareness2007, is also offering a prize in what is billed as the “SEO World Championship”. Instead of bombarding the internet with movie recommendations, the internet is being bombarded with websites around the topic of globalwarming awareness in 2007.
Time to dust off the dirt on your URLs. When writing content, replication is something you should try to avoid. When you have hundreds of pages, its difficult to make every page unique.
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Especially if you have an ecommerce site where pages also look very similar to other merchant sites with the same products. Other merchants tend to use the same descriptions provided by vendors. Different URLS with Similar Text or DUST is the new buzzword. We’ve been checking out some abstracts and white papers to help bury this problem.
Creating a new website and the links to it is cheap and easy to do. Thousands upon thousands of websites and pages can be created by a single person or company covering a single topic in an attempt to skew the search engine results. Therefore, search engines like Google look at ways to measure the importance and relevancy of a website to match it with search keyphrases.
After the title tags and the keyword use on a webpage, one of the most important factors is the number links pointing to a website. Analysis of a website’s links has improved the quality of web searches. Links that are trusted and carry a lot of weight can give a significant boost to your rankings.
Some factors in determining how links are weighted:
1) Large host: Links from large hosts like AOL have a high weight due to their immense size.
2) Links from directories carry a fair amount of weight. Examples include DMOZ, Yahoo directory
3) Links from “authority sites“. Usually end in .edu or .gov. Examples include Wikipedia
4) Spam websites or pornography sites carry negative weight and can severely hurt rankings.
5) Link farms. Links from sites that sell links contribute negative weight.
The Google algorithm looks at the “ageness” of those links. If your website is new and the links along with it, then Google will not consider those links to carry much weight. Also known as the “sandbox” period.
Over time, as your links age and you accumulate more links, your website will build reputation in the eyes of the search engine and rankings will increase. However, one loophole exists and that is a 301 redirect. Using a 301 redirect from an old website can apply all the backlinks and page rank to the new site with the “ageness” included. The only drawback is that the site that receives the redirect will be treated as a new site and go into “the sandbox” for a period of time. But, it will emerge with all the backlinks, link ageness and page rank from the old site.