Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

Matt Clutts, who works at Google, has just produced a free online video that has lots of cool info for search engine optimization and web design. Here is the URL:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-answers-on-google-video/
(If you have trouble finding the video in the library, click on the first less on this page.)

Topics include:

• Qualities of a good site

• Design for users or search engine?

• Some SEO Myths

If you wish, you can set Google up to provide you - free of charge- some key statistics on how people are finding you in Google. To start, use the same entrance page that you used to set up your sitemap, or:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview

1. Set up a free account in Google if you haven’t already.

2. Add your site URL to the list on the page if it isn’t already there.

3. Click the Verify button to the right of the URL listing.

4. Choose the type of verify. You can do it by adding a web page to the site or by using a Meta tag on your home page. I like to add a page to the site - in that way I don’t have to modify existing pages.

5. Google will return the file name for this page.
   Keep your Google page open and start your HTML editor. Create a blank page with the specified name and upload it to the main directory of your site.

6. Return to the Google page and tell Google the page has been uploaded.

7. Return to the entry page and wait until Google verifies it has found it.

This will start Google on a pilgrimage of collecting data for your site. To see this data, return to the entrance page as:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview

Click the URL of the site. You will then see a menu at the top and left of the page. Try the various options. If you select Statistics at the top and Query Stats at the left, you will see your position when a person queries Google for various search terms. A low number is best - as it defines your position. A value of 1, for example, would mean that you were the top site returned on that search term. To the right you can see another column that shows the terms people clicked through to your site on. Again, it shows your position in the returned results.

Google also has an additional analysis feature that you can reach using:

http://analytics.google.com
Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t exist yet. Google bought it from Urchin. In fact, they bought the whole company. The feature , however, isn’t there yet. If you host with us, we can add the Urchin to your site directly for an extra $10 a month. This is well worth it for a serious web site.

Get lots of tips with Verison 9 of our SEO Book….

In indexing a site in the search engines, Google first finds your home page and saves the information on that page to it’s index. Then Google comes back later (generally weeks) and crawls down your site indexing the rest of your site from the links on your home page. Unfortunately, for most sites these links are Flash, JavaScript, or dynamic links. Google has a hard time following anything but text links. And text links look ugly compared to those other types.

To solve this, you should create a site map page that has links to the other pages. Then you put one text link on your home page - normally at the bottom of the page - to this sitemap page that has text links to all the other pages. Then, when Google starts its crawl-down, it finds the text link on your home page, follows it to your sitemap page, and then finds the other links and indexes the rest of your pages. Even a small site, such as 5 or 6 pages, should still use a site map.

Google has tried to help the users here by providing a sitemap generator that you can use at no charge to create a special sitemap page. The generated page is an XML file. Once you generate this you can put it on your server, tell Google it’s there, and you’re done. You don’t need to modify any other files. Google hopes other search engines adopt there standard (that’s why the generator is free).

Obviously, this generator can help your ranking in Google. It will never hurt your rank. To get started, go to the intro page at:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

To create the sitemap for Google, go to:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview

We suggest setting up a free account on Google for this if you haven’t all ready. This permits you to get additional and interesting statistical information on your site. Use the Help button on this page to get started on using the tools.

The problem with Google’s sitemap generator is that it requires python on your server. My server doesn’t have that. Several third party companies have come up with sitemap generators that create this XML sitemap file without python and these are often free to use. My favorite is at:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Here is the simple strategy for creating a winning sitemap file and getting it
working for you:

1. Use the above third-party xml-sitemaps.com generator to create the XML and HTML files. Just enter your URL and let’er rip.
2. Transfer both of these files to your host server using an FTP program. Put them in the main directory with your other main files.

3. Go to:
   http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview and set up an account in Google if you don’t have one.

4. Choose to add a sitemap.

5. Specify the path to your sitemap XML file.

6. Tell Google to go.

Google will then check your file and notify you if the file was OK. This takes only a few minutes or so.

That’s it! Use the sitemap.html file with other search engines that don’t support the Google’s XML format yet. For those, just modify your home page with a text link to the sitemap.html file.

We’ve just updated our SEO book and it is now version 9. It’s now all of 240 pages and available for immediate download. Here are some of the major changes:

• The PPC chapter has major updates. Learn which PPC advertiser is best and how to use their service to get those sales

• Getting in the DMOZ Directory is a big plus for getting high in the search engines. Find out how to get in this directory and minimize your wait time for this listing.

Of course, there is much, much more in this book. Why don’t you get these secrets and get ahead of your competitors? For more info, see http://www.web-site-search-engine-positioning.net/
If you have version 7 or 8 of the book, the update is free.

Now that the BigDaddy update is over, what does this mean? What is Google looking at as important now in ranking your site? Here are some things we’ve noticed:

• Incoming link quality is used to determine how deep Google will crawl your site. Those incoming links and their quality are important!

• Pages that were sharing common Title and Description text were often seen as duplicate pages and some were dropped. Also dropped were pages without Titles and Descriptions. Use Titles and Descriptions and keep them unique to the pages you are indexing. They should also be optimized for the keyword phrases on that page.

• The more unique pages are in your site, the better the quality of your rankings.

• If your page has a lot links coming in (low link popularity), you are less likely to get a lot of those links crawled.

• Some of Google’s tools are not working too well. The Link command has been broken for some time. The Site command sometimes failed, not showing some pages on yor site that really are in the index. Other commands such as inanchor and allinanchor may not work right at times.

Vista Beta 2 released to the public June 7. Want to try it? Here’s the link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/default.mspx

The Beta 2 of Microsoft Vista, or more technically “Vista Consumer CTP” or Community Technology Preview, should be released at any moment. Reports from those using this Beta 2 will be the big clue as to whether Microsoft can meet their delivery date of getting Vista to major customers in Novemeber and to the public in January. Beta 2 has to be stable enough for day-to-day work, or the testers can’t complete their work on time. Manufacturing has to start soon, so the Beta 2 stability is a critical issue for the January release.

Microsoft released in May the final hardware specs to run Vista:
Vista Capable (Just to run Vista)
800 Mhz processor
512M RAM
DirectX 9 support at graphics processor

PCs with all Vista Features
1GHz processor
1G RAM
128 Mb of video memory
Direct 9 capable, plus WDDM suppport, Pixel Shader 2 support, and a color depth of 32 bits a pixel

Remember that the processor support with Vista is much more demanding, so you should expect slower response on any current system unless you have upgraded the hardware to handle the extra load.

Here are a few good web sites for developers:

Lost your site?
You try to pull up your site on the Internet and it won’t come up. Is it your computer, the network, or your server? A quick way to find out is to go to http://www.alertra.com. For free, they will attempt to reach your site from various cities around the world and tell you how much time it takes to reach your site from each location. They also offer a subscription service if you want them to continuously monitor your up time.

Are You On a Spammer Black List?
Your mail may be filtered by various servers if you are on one of these black lists. This site will check your IP on those lists and verify your IP is good. Go to http://rbls.org.

Who sent that Spam?
So you got illegal spam. Do you know how to trace it to the source host? Use your email program to read the header. Although much of the header can be forged, those lines beginning “Received: from…” are very difficult for a sender to forge. Check your email program to find out how to read the header, then look for those “Received: from…” lines going top down - remember, the header is tracing backwards through the various relay points. The last one is generally the one with the IP of the sender’s host. Here is an example of the last “Received: from…” line from an illegal spam today:

Received: from source ([59.23.108.165]) by exprod7mx54.postini.com ([64.18.6.10]) with SMTP;
Tue, 06 Jun 2006 09:04:12 EDT

This spam is from a host at 59.23.108.

Take that IP and go to http://www.samspade.org or http://www.netsol.com or http://www.tucows.com to find the spammer’s host.

Any email listing on this registrar is often non-functional or, in some cases, an abuse email listing that generates only an auto-reply. The best way to stop the spammer is to put the IP on your own black list (as we do) and make it available to hackers for their fun. You have to take charge of your own spam problem.

How is Your Internet Speed?
What’s your true Internet speed? You can use the web site at http://bandwidthplace.com/speedtest/ to test your site and get your speed.

How’s Your Firewall?
This site will test your firewall, check to see you have no reverse DNS (generally, you do not want reverse DNS), and tell you your current IP. All free. This is Steve Gibson’s famous Shields Up site”
>https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2.

How’s Your Anti-Virus?
GFI will test your anti-virus protection free at:
http://www.gfi.com/emailsecuritytest/, but don’t expect to past this. They sell the really good enterprise-level stuff, so your home system may not pass this one.

Note: the anti-virus and firewall testing tools will NOT damage your system, but if you are on a network you should check with the network administrator first. He may get worried if he or she sees someone trying to get through the network defense system.

One of our clients recently complained that suddenly they couldn’t send any email. Their outgoing email (SMTP) was through Comcast, and it was being was filtered with a spam filter. The commercial black list used for that had their IP listed as a spamming IP and blocking their outgoing email. Their outgoing IP belonged to Comcast.

Comcast uses dynamic IP addressing by default. About once a week, they tell me, the IP is reset. Normally, it’s reset to the same value. About once a month, however, it is reset to a new IP. The new IP he got was black listed as a spamming IP.

Comcast has a serious problem with this. On our own black list at:
http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm
we list several Comcast IPs that have spammed us. This list is public, and goes to hackers with our encouragement. These incoming emails are illegal. We notify Comcast on their abuse email at the current time when this happens, but so far they have not replied except with an auto-reply and they seem to have no concern about clearing any listing here. The resulting IPs would be unstable along with their host system because we encourage hackers to use this list for their development and nuking.

If you wish to see if your own IP is listed on the commercial black lists, you can check:
http://rbls.org

Just remember - if you are using Comcast, you have no assurance that the IP they roll into you is clean. If you have your own host for email and use Comcast for SMTP, you should be sure your host has a good spam filter (using a commercial black list) and can protect you.

With Microsoft’s new operating system on the horizon, what are some of the key questions you are asking? Here is a good overview from Information Week.:
http://www.desktoppipeline.com/187202950