Uptimebot

Yahoo! Seems to have started working seriously on their search. Many updates, new features, plans. This time, Tim Mayer has announced search index updates. Personally, I hope that Yahoo! will finally make competition to Google, cause being “the one and only” Google makes a lot of difficulties for webmasters.

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Filed under: Yahoo and MSN

Keywords in title of your page

Correct use of keywords in title tag of your page is probably one of the most important points in this article. Title tag is a “face” of your page for both search engine robots and surfers. Even though it’s not the only criteria, title tag makes a lot of sense for visitors – human and robots. Choosing keywords for title consider something that will describe all you’d like to present in no more than 2-3 keywords. For instance if your site is selling cars, motorcycles, car and motorcycle parts, oils, etc., consider “automotive” keyword, or “vehicles, motorcycles, parts”, but no more. Many webmasters stuff title tag with all keywords they find – rough mistake leading to get banned. Remember – no more than 2-3 words describing content in general.

Linguistic aspect of keyword installation

Do you remember how you search for this or that keywords? If you search for “apple”, it is more likely that you will try “apples” to; you may also look for “apple salad”, “apple pie” and so on. As a webmaster, your goal is to find out the most probable keywords and keyword phrases, which will exactly fit surfers’ searches.

You can either use Wordtracker to find best key phrases for your site, or guess what would you search. Considering plural or singular word form one must remember that various search engines are using different methods of content analysis. For instance if you write an article containing only plural keyword forms, some search engines may display you in search results for both plural and singular search term, but some will display your page only for plural search term. Thus it is recommended to use both variants and it is also recommended (if possible) to create separate pages for plural and singular forms of a keyword. Remember that you can’t just make a copy of a page and change keywords form – this way you risk to get filtered for duplicate content.

How to distribute my keywords over site?

In case if your keywords list contains no more than five – include them in all pages of your site having only added one or two unique in order to make pages unlike. In case if your keywords list is much longer – consider planning site branches that will describe categories and subcategories of main keyword. For instance, if your site is about cars, motorcycles, car parts and motorcycle parts, the right structure will be the following (in my opinion and according to my experience):

Index page – “automotive, cars, motorcycles”

main page links to the following, anchor text corresponds titles of categories pages

Category1 “cars” | Category 2 “motorcycles” | Category 3 “car parts” | Category 4 “motorcycle parts”

categories link to subcategories, anchor text contains titles of subcategories pages – let’s take the first one – “cars” – here how it’s derivatives’ keywords will look like.

SubCat1 “new cars” | SubCat2 “used cars” | SubCat3 “german cars” | SubCat4 “japanese cars”, etc.

You see that one common keyword page links to smaller, narrower ones, then these narrow link to even more narrow, as we say “keywords of the lowest frequency” – however, these lowest frequency keywords are giving best results in ranking because they are appropriate for less pages than “automotive” keyword. On the other hand correct linking structure of site can powerfully increase your main keyword relevancy, thus forcing it to compete serious sites.

This was the second part of “Thoughts and Facts about Keyword Density” article. See last part of this article soon.

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Filed under: Dealing with Keywords

There is much controversy around title separators. Some webmasters pay no attention to kind and functional side of title separators, some think that using right title separators is a very important step in page’s optimization. Such controversy forced me to make a research on my pages and with help of other webmasters. Here are the results.

It has been proved that various title separators actually make same sense. Well, not all of them, but the majority of title separators used by webmasters. However, I’ve seen even “<” and “[“ separators in titles of some pages – these variants are really bad, because of their HTML significance. Others – spaces, commas, hyphens, pipe tags, etc. are good – so what to choose.

The second part of research was a mass opinion check. According to the poll surfers better understand pipe tags as separators than hyphens. Hyphen reminds dash and dash is more like to be a continue of phrase, than it’s separation – thus pipe tag is better from surfers’ point of view. However, Google guides are always saying that they are looking for pages with correct English grammar – thus for pages containing correctly expressed thoughts and complete phrases and messages. Considering correct grammar, we must consider commas and hyphens instead of pipe tags.

Summary. Concluding all mentioned above, I can say that we have distinguished 3 separators that fit both search engines and surfers. It’s up to you what to choose – convenience for surfers or search engines. Both are important, so your goal is to vary these distinguished tags to please both sides.

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Filed under: HTML and Page Coding

We all know how doubtful and unpredictable the majority of optimization methods are. You find and learn something, you make sites and they seem to be positioned on top pages, but everything ruins all of a sudden, Google adds new filters, new page appraisal methods and you can just take a deep breath and start over again. Sometimes you trap into blind alley and doubt what to do. It’s time to relax and spend a little more time getting back to the basics, which stand beyond all search engine optimization methods – Indexing.

Sometimes, when we optimize and overoptimize our sites, we forget that a page, which you’d like to be well positioned in any search engine must be indexable primarily! These are just the few of reasons why your page can be slowly or completely not indexed by spiders.

1. Check your robots.txt file – does it allows all spiders to see contents of your site?
2. Check your webserver options – it can block a document or a directory.
3. After finishing a site always check it for correct functioning of all installed scripts and plugins. Use special software that checks site for broken links.
4. Check your site for blind pages. These are pages to which you can click through, but wherefrom there is no links neither to other pages, nor to the main page of your site. Blind pages are not just difficult indexing, but badly influence on PR distribution over all over your site. Page Rank is like water – it needs a channel to flow in and a channel to flow out – otherwise it will uselessly stay at your blind page making no further profit for site in general.
5. Check automatic redirects. They are generally unwanted on a well-optimized sites, but anyway, if there are redirects – check them for correct functioning and check whether all browsers correctly understand your redirection codes.
6. It is recommended to avoid JavaScript and drop-down navigations. They are good only in case if they duplicate plain HTML navigation.
7. Check pages’ Meta tags – are they allow robots to index the page and all it’s contents.
8. Avoid duplicate content, invisible text and links on your site. This can easily cause ban.
9. Try not to use old domains re-buying them from other webmasters. Anyway – if you buy a new domain – check it’s history.

Summary. Building a site you should always keep indexing as priority over all optimization tricks – if your page won’t be properly indexed – your site will probably get worst rankings, regardless all tricks you use.

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Filed under: HTML and Page Coding

Yahoo! decided to build a technology-based site – cell phones, computers, cameras and other technical supplies and gadgets. It is your chance to take party in creation of such an interesting project.

The project’s job listing sets a proposal to become a member of team building brand new site for surfers to discover, find and use modern consumer technologies, such as computers, digital cameras, mp3 and other music formats players, etc.

The whole project features sounds like Yahoo! Shopping restyling, but with more content, user reviews, editorial notes, etc.

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Filed under: Yahoo and MSN

A few days ago Uptimebot.com has changed it’s appearance and added a Search Engine Optimization Blog. You can read about the point of our intentions at the top of the page, but this tread is about something else…

The general mistake of many news weblogs and directories is that subjects, news and categories of news are defined by the owner of site. We are interested in making UptimeNews maximum interesting and useful for you. Thus I ask everybody, who is really interested in convenient Search Engine Optimization news blog to share your ideas about subjects, news and categories of news you’d like to read. Share your thoughts in comments to this posts.

As it is alredy said, your articles, tips and questions are also always welcome. Register using this link and start posting now.

Active authors and interesting questions wanted

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Filed under: Uptimebot.com News

It has been discovered during trying to validate some XML documents.

For example, encoding for “»” is & r a q u o ; During research on HTML entities, it has been discovered that search engines have different query input convert.

Google search engine converts HTML encoded characters into character it represents before query is processed. Let’s take Õ as an example – this character is encoded as & # 2 1 3 ;

Searching for & # 2 1 3 ; we receive for both “Õ” and “O” from Google. It means that Google engine knows that “O” and “Õ” are probably the same – “Õ” is a variation of “O”. The same search in Yahoo! returns search results for “213”. We can conclude that Yahoo! cuts characters before processing search query, or it doesn’t represents character encoding at all. MSN does just the same to Yahoo! Try searching for “A” and “& # 6 5 ;” for better understanding of the question.

Moreover, all search engines return different error codes. Searching for “& # 3 6 ;” (which represents “$”) we’ll receive no results in Google. There are neither results, nor error messages returned. The same situation is if you search for “$”. Since Yahoo! and MSN are cutting language meaningless characters off, the query “& # 3 6 ;” returns a search for “36”. Searching for “$” you will receive an error message that will tell that there are no search results for “$”.

According to the research made, we can make a conclusion that Google is the only search engine from “The big trio” that understands (or allows) searches for specific HTML characters and their language meaningless character representations.

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Filed under: Optimization News

Before answering this question let’s understand why should we get listed there. ODP (Dmoz) data is used on 209 powerful sites, but we are mostly interested in Google, which directory (directory.google.com) is a copy of ODP. Getting listed in Dmoz will extremely increase your Link Popularity and can increase your Page Rank. Some SEO theories say that sites listed in dmoz are passed by the majority of Google filters – isn’t it a treasure?Let’s get to the matter of this article:What should you do about the design of your site?Many mistake thinking that design is the most important thing of a website. They are mistaking, because Dmoz always prefers interesting sites than beautiful – even if your site is about web design it is more important to give interesting content than rich design. However, make sure that you haven’t made one of 10 general mistakes in web design:

1. It is rather bad than good to have frames on your site.
2. Usage of the top modern technologies (heavy flash, large scripts and scenarios that can slow-down your average page loading time.
3. Too long text scrolling length and repeating animation. It is better to make five short pages than one long. Google reads just first 100 Kb of code (including text) anyway.
4. Long, roughly looking URLs.
5. Blind pages. (e.g. you enter the page and there is no navigation to go to the main page or other levels of your site.
6. Navigation panel scrolling.
7. Absence of navigation.
8. Unusual link colors.
9. Old information (information can be actual after years, but some news, facts, etc., can become old in few months)
10. Slow page loading.

It is more likely that an editor is an experienced user and that he will adequately appraise your site, regardless these mistakes, but it is better to facilitate his job and surfers efforts at once. Moreover, some editors can simply have no time to fight with all that impediments and will probably reject your site. Surely there are some fully graphical sites, but they are examples of really amazing webmastering mastership. It is also useful to become an editor of dmoz, but don’t think that it is easier to list a site – it’s much more harder.Your goal is to pay as much attention to content and light, cute design. Forget about heavy design and lack of content.About site contentsThe general rule of ODP is that the site MUST be useful for visitors and contain unique information (if possible).Remember about copyright and hope that having gathered a bunch of content from a couple of sites you will be successfully listed in dmoz. It is better to write your own articles and use your own pictures, photos and graphics anyway. ODP is not a copyright protection agency, but category editors are usually aware of the majority of sites of their category subject.

Thus it is more likely that they have already seen the origin of text or graphics you steal. Of course, some sites with stolen content are still getting listed, but these cases are exceptions and such sites are usually getting deleted soon.Check spelling and grammar. It is unlikely that “Gangsta boyz” site will be listed. The exception is when it is a name of a music band, or something unique – then you must specify it in the description of your site. For instance “Gangsta Boyz” is a designers studio name.Try not to make a mess from your site. Portals are now leaving the edge of popularity, but anyway, remember that it is much harder to make a quality portal than a niche website. You must know that a typical site is getting listed in one (and only) category in dmoz. There are exceptions, but these exceptions are given to giants of web, such as Yahoo! and so on. I will give you an example. Recently I have seen a site, which have been moved from category to category for 3 months! Index page of a site said that it is a designer’s catalogue, there were a couple of pages about programming, a page with graphic samples. So, it had a lot of useful information, but also had vast expense of trash. Few words for “vendors”: sites which contain no unique information are not listed in ODP. So, if you will create a catalogue of goods, which is copied from another shop or catalogue or whatever else you will not be listed. The same statement is true for various affiliate programs owners and partners – 99,9% of moneymakers can forget about their dream to get listed in dmoz. As for “vendors” – I’d recommend you not to hope for uniqueness of your prices, but to add interesting content to existing goods photos and descriptions – articles about what you sale, quality and qualities (functional) comparison, customer reviews, etc.

The more unique and useful information you give – the higher is your chance to get good traffic, popularity and thus listing in dmoz, what will finally result in better Search Engine Ranking. It’s worth to say that neither pay or free hosting, nor quantity of visitors of your site cannot affect probability for your site to get listed in ODP.A little trick: availability of a news archive can help an editor appraising frequency of your site’s updates and thus decide to list it. Once again – the general rule is unique content – prevailing criteria over all.Writing site title and description.I’ve seen “submitting guides” of submission suggestions that said that the title and description must be written one time and then repeat in all further submissions in all directories – just via copy/paste method. Just the same method is used by various submission software – same data is transferred to various directories’ scripts. I’m not against facilitation of routine work, but, however, I recommend individual approach to each large and important directory, because their rules can vary.

The most important webmaster’s goal submitting a site to ODP is writing a title and description, which an editor won’t will to change – otherwise all your efforts of choosing right keywords for your site’s title can turn senseless (See “Choosing right keywords for your site” article). That’s why it is important to think about editor firstly (e.g. follow simple rules of submission), than care about all keywords you want to have in title and description. Let’s begin from writing a title. It must be both informing and short. Moreover, it must adequately describe your site. If you neglect this rule, an editor will change it into the title of a page of your site, which have been submitted to dmoz. A bit more rules:

1. Title must begin with a capital letter.
2. Separate words shouldn’t consist of capital letters, excluding commonly known abbreviations, such as BBC, USSR, UN, ICPO, etc.
3. Title shouldn’t be ended with questioning, exclamatory or other punctuation symbols.(e.g. !?,*, etc)
4. Title shouldn’t contain worthless and meaningless symbols, digits and letters.
5. Title shouldn’t contain common phrases like “Welcome to…”, “Home page of…”, “Online…”.

Now we shall pay better attention to the fourth point. Though ODP sites are sorted in alphabetic order, some webmasters try to change their titles to start with some letter closer to the beginning of the alphabet in order to get listed higher. Think before doing this – do you actually need it? Dmoz is good for increasing link popularity, page rank and thus better search engine ranking, but it’s traffic is not that high, especially in niche categories. At the same time, Google Directory (which is a copy of ODP) lists sites in PageRank order. If you want get listed higher any way, avoid popular abridgements, such as 2u, 4u, 1st and so on. Don’t forget about grammar and spelling.Everything, I talked about is good for title. Description must reflect specific features of your site. Description must give surfers of directory ability to define the importance of your site for them. Here are some rules of writing a description:

1. Description must underline all unique features of your site – features that make your site distinctive from the crowd.
2. Abridgements and abbreviations can be used if they are notorious (commonly known) only. 3. Description shouldn’t contain notorious phrases, like “This site contains…”
4. All phrases must be logically completed.
5. Sentences must end with a dot.

Choosing a categoryIf you have correctly written title and description of the site and haven’t neglected our tips about design and site contents, then choosing a category won’t make much efforts both for you and an editor. Time that listing will take is dependent on choosing a right category. Ideally, all branches of your site must correspond category subject and be described in site description. As I have said, as a rule, one site gets listed in one category only. Find the category, which is exactly, or probably exactly matching the subject of your site, even if it will appear deep in categories tree. If branches of your site are matching a couple of categories, which have the same parent category – submit your site to this parent category. If branches of your site are matching categories with different parent categories – then try to guess, which category it is more devoted to, or exclude less important materials matching another category from your site.Summary: try to facilitate editor’s job – make everything precise and he will have only to click “add” button. Otherwise you risk not to be listed, or get listed after a long period of time.Banned methods.I won’t going to try to change mind of that webmasters, which accustomed to cheating directories. I just want to warn those, who want start training with ODP.

It is more like that your attempts will fail. Undoubtedly, you can achieve temporary success, but just temporary. The point is that in dmoz, in contradistinction to other popular directories, editors are not company employees, but volunteers. Each category is watched by several people including this category editor, parent category editor, parent of parent category editor and so on up to meta editors, which look after all categories in ODP. Thus, if your site has been added with help of banned methods - it is more like that it will be deleted sooner or later. Commonly known banned methods are: bribe of editors, or listing exchange, attempts of listing it in several categories of dmoz (this method is easily spotted with simple domain search, which is a custom tool of dmoz editors), usage of redirects (redirects are spotted by dmoz robot and reported to editors), frequently repeated attempts to add your site to various categories (flooding), spamming editors’ e-mails, etc.Remember – using banned methods can cause removal of all your sites from ODP.

What to do if your site has been rejected?In case if you have followed all my recommendations, it is more like that your site will be accepted. However, I think it is worth to talk about what to do if your site has been rejected. First thing to do is to remember and save date, when you have sent an application. You must remember date, because you won’t receive any rejection notification, unless the editor will mail you, if he would like to. You must also remember the date of last category update (the category, where your have submitted your site) – you can find it at the bottom of a category page. Then revisit your category in two weeks and see the update date. If the date has changed and your site is still out (don’t forget to clean browser cache) – it’s a bad sign. There are two possible variants: your site is either deleted, or left to be reviewed later for an unlimited term. If the category update date haven’t changed – wait another 2 weeks and see it again. If your site is still out – try to contact editor of this category, or editor of parent category (who is also eligible to modify sites in all children directories). You can also ask about your site’s status at public dmoz forum (www.resource-zone.com).Personal recommendation: be polite, when talking or exchanging messages with editors and other members of dmoz and mentioned forum. Hope this article will help you to get listed as in dmoz, so in other categories. Good luck!

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Filed under: Directories and Submitting

Yahoo! snatched up two more companies: Blo.gs and Dialpad.

Blo.gs is a blog tracking service and a ping infrastructure. A ping service like blo.gs is essentially a hub for the world’s blogs - almost every single blog software pings blo.gs by default. Blo.gs is so tied into the blog network (Technorati, Feedster, PubSub all work with blo.gs), that it would be much harder to recreate blo.gs and made much more sense to purchase the service.

Dialpad is a VoIP provider. Yahoo’s purchase of Dialpad will allow them to offer VoIP service without relying on the service of another company. Yahoo will most likely leverage Dialpad’s VoIP services to improve Yahoo! Messenger.

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Filed under: Yahoo and MSN