Comparison Search Tools

Last year, I saw a few,  new comparison search tools over the internet. I not quite sure; but maybe; there is something inspired programmers to develop new tools and sites to let us compare search results. Well, take a look at this comparison search tools:

Search3
One of the simpler tools, and probably the one with the cleanest interface, Search3 does what it name suggests: It lets you compare the results of three separate search sites in a single page. There are two options, web search (shown below) or image search. On the web search side, you can choose three sites from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, and eBay. On the image side, you can choose three from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Flickr.

Googawho?
More traditional in its look, Googawho? also offers more search engine choices and some additional tools that other comparison search tools are lacking. It pulls the actual search results pages from the sites you’re comparing into frames so you see the full set of results — including universal/blended results and even paid search ads.

Panabee
The most sophisticated and useful of the comparison tools I’m looking at today, Panabee offers the traditional two-frame comparison that many sites offer. But what sets Panabee apart is the breadth of sites you can compare and the ability to customize it via a “Favorites” tab that appears at the top of each frame.

Maps Compare
The last comparison search tool on the list is also the most unique. Rather than comparing web search or image results, Maps Compare lets you compare the map search results of four sites on a single page: Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Bing Maps, and Google Earth.

The Concept of Do Follow and No Follow Links

As you start link building your website, you will encounter links in two form: either it is a “do follow” one or a “no follow” one. If you are just new in SEO, you might ask: what is the difference between the two? To show you how a “do follow” link differs from a “no follow” link, take a look at this example:

Link 1: Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tutorial

Link 2: Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tutorial

Looks the same, isn’t it? Actually, in naked eyes (without using any SEO tools), the two links looks exactly the same, but if we’ll take a look at their code:

Link 1: Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tutorial

Code: <a title="Search Engine optimization Tips and Tutorial" href="https://seoexplorer.wordpress.com">Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tutorial</a>

Link 2: Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tutorial

Code: <a title="Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tutorial" rel="nofollow" href="https://seoexplorer.wordpress.com">Search Engine Optimization Tips and Tutorial</a>

As you can see, Link 2 (which is a No Follow Link) has an No Follow Tag; an HTML attribute value used to instruct some search engines (like Google) that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s ranking in the search engine’s index. It is intended to reduce the effectiveness of certain types of search engine spam, thereby improving the quality of search engine results and preventing spamdexing from occurring. On the other hand, Link 1 (which is a Do Follow Link) is just a link that do not use the ‘nofollow’ attribute. In other words, this is the kind of normal link which pass value and credit towards improving search engine ranks.

No follow links were first developed by Google as a way to control spam links on blogs and other sites. There was a valid complaint that many legitimate sites were being penalized if they had a large number of links to other sites with little or no value. By adding the no follow tag to any links (rel=“nofollow”), blog publishers and forum owners were provided a tool to prevent spammers from posting endless useless comments simply to get a free link back to a site that you might not want to be associated with.

It is important to distinguish a no follow link from a do follow one. Why? When you are using different methods in order to build links on other websites (to increase your search engine rankings), you need to determine if the websites you are attempting to get your site listed on use the “nofollow” tag or not. If they do, it may still be a good idea to try to get that link there, but it is generally regarded as not the best use of time since the search engines don’t follow that link and you don’t get any increase in search engine rankings from that link. Here are some SEO tools to check whether a link is a do follow one or not:

Search Status – a Firefox adds on that highlight no follow links in pink; it also show the Page Rank and Alexa Rank of the website that was currently viewing.
SEO For Firefox – another Firefox adds on that highlight no follow links in red. Also show the ranking position of the website whenever you search in any major search engines.

No follow tags has good purposed when it comes in applying it to your OWN website. Whenever you have paid links in your website, Google highly recommending to use no follow attributes on this links. Essentially, your sites page rank give a small amount of rank juice to the sites you link to (which helps their search engine ranking, which is the purpose of link building, to get that juice from others). If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. They don’t like that. Also, as what I have mentioned before), you might preferred to used a no follow tag in your blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic). It is up to you if you want your commentators to get link juice back to their site. It is personal preference.

By the way, there’s nothing wrong with getting no follow links. In fact, you’ll want to get an equal amount of them as well. While they don’t pass on link juice, they do help associate your site with anchor text (the keyword phrase that makes up the URL pointing to your site). For me, any link is good as long as it was a quality and related one, no matter whether it is a do follow or no follow one.

Google Caffeine: Experimental Search Engine

I want to paused for a while my tutorial about the basic SEO to discuss this hot topic in the world of search engine optimization today. It’s all about Google Caffeine. Many SEO practitioners are talking about this since mid August this year 2009. But, what is this all about?

Google Caffeine is a public experiment conduct by Google for its new improved version of Google Search Engine. It was formally announced in its Google Webmaster Central Blog. According to them:

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

Based from this statement, we can say that the main improvement we can see in the upcoming and new-improved Google will be more on indexing factors. In one of Matt Cutt’s reply in his blog, Matt Cutt said that: “we’re not looking to make huge changes in ranking with this new infrastructure. Some rankings will change, but that’s not the main thrust of the infrastructure.”

It is true. If you are going to compare the search results for “Google Algorithm Update” between current Google and the experimental Caffeine,  you can see that there are only minimal changes in ranking position of  websites in search result; wherein some ranking positions are altered in experimental Caffeine with other websites which is not included in current google search result. Comparing the speed of showing the search result (with the same search term we used above), we can see that the new Google show result more faster (47.0 seconds) than current Google (53.0 seconds). In terms of number of results, Caffeine show less number of results with only 490,000+ for “Google Algorithm Update” compared to current Google which show 650,000+ result for the same search term. I think this is because of Google’s improvement in terms of result relevancy in search query. You can also try to to compare also the results of the the following search term using Compare Caffeine; a tool use to compare the result of current Google and Experimental Caffeine. Observe how they differs in term of Number of Web Pages in Search Result, Result Query Time, and the Websites SERP:

Google Caffeine News           Page Rank Checker Tool
Google Caffeine Update        SERP Checker Tool
What is Google Caffeine        Backlink Checker Tool
Google Caffeine Update        Index Page Checker Tool

For a common user, you will not notice the difference; but if you are a keen observer, you will notice that Google are starting to implement the new algorithm little by little. No one know when will this new Google will be launch. But one thing is sure: this experiment of Google will bring changes in the world of search engine optimization; a new challenge to all SEO practitioners and webmasters.


Page Rank and Search Engine Ranking Position

Google Page Rank (PR) and Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) are always integrated TOO MUCH to each other by many newbies. Lots of newbies think that having high PR will put them into good SERP (especially in Google); also, they think that having good SERP means having high PR. In reality, Google Page Rank and (Google) search engine ranking position are two different things and calculated in different ways. Now, let us see the difference between Google Page Rank and Search Engine Ranking Position.

Google Page Rank or PR (named after Larry Page) show the importance of a webpage to World Wide Web. According to Google’s description about Google Page Rank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Based from this description of Google Page Rank, we can say that the result of Page Rank of a particular webpage is based on the number of webpages linking to it. For example, each link gain by SEO Explorer Blog will count like a “one vote” on how important SEO Explorer Blog is to World Wide Web. Also, the Page Rank of the webpage that casted the “vote” is also a factor; so, linking to high Page rank webpage can give you high Page rank, too. It is not necessary for a page to have many inbound links to rank well. A single link from a high ranking page is sufficient. You can check the Page Rank of a website using different Page Rank Checker Tools like the following:

Google PageRank Checker–  a live Page Rank checker online; also provide PR badge to show the Page Rank of your website.

Valid Rank – Another live Page Rank checker online.

Google Toolbar – provides PR bar at your FireFox browser, showing the PR of the website you currently viewing.

Search Status – provide Page Rank of currently viewing website in text or bar format; show also Alexa Rank.

On the other hand, Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) is the actual search result position of a website in a search engine based from the given search query. The higher placement in search engine search query result means higher SERP rank. SERP of a website for a particular keyword varies since each search engine (Google, Yahoo!, Bing) has different algorithm. In Google, Page Rank is one of more than 200 search engine ranking factors. Keyword use anywhere in the title tag, keyword use in the root domain name, substantive / unique content on the page, and recency /freshness of page creation are the top ranking factors in Google.

It’s much accurate to check SERP manually; but to help you check your SERP faster, here are some tools to check your SERP: (NOTE: the following tools may NOT PROVIDE ACCURATE RESULT; don’t rely to this completely.)

Google SERP Checker – a Google SERP checker that check website ranking position up to 1000th position or 100th page.

SERP Rush – an SERP checker for Google, Yahoo, and Bing; check website position up to 250th position or 25th page.

SEOBook Rank Checker – a FireFox Adds-On that check website SERP in Google, Yahoo, and Bing in multiple keywords.

Page Rank and Search Engine Ranking Position are both important. With high Page Rank, you will gain “authority” in World wide Web; on the other hand, with good search engine ranking position, you will received more “organic” traffics from search engines; much easier for you to reach your targeted audiences. I’m suggesting that you focus more on having good SERP; for me, because PR can be gain naturally.

The Importance of Sitemap to Websites and Search Engines

Sitemap is the graphical representation of a website’s architecture. It is like a book’s table of content: sitemap contains all the accessible webpages within a website; Basically, it provides a “communication channel” between the search engines and the website. Sitemap help search engine spiders to crawl and index the inner pages of a website. A sitemap can be either any kind of documents (usually, it is in XML or Text format; mainly for search engine spiders only.) or another webpage listing all the existing webpages of a website (beneficial for both human users and search engine spiders.) Asides from the benefit of helping the search engine crawl the inner pages much faster and easier, it is also beneficial for websites which are using or made up of flash; also for those websites that has dynamic contents / pages.

You can generate sitemap for your website using Sitemap Generator. With this sitemap generator, you can download the uncompressed XML sitemap, the sitemap in HTML format, and the sitemap in text format; which later need to be upload to your website. Then, your website are now ready to submit to major search engines through the following links (you need an account for each search engine webmaster tools):

Google Webmaster Tools – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Yahoo! Site Explorer – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Bing Webmaster Tools – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/

Just follow the step-by-step process in each webmaster tools; then, you are done submitting your website to Google, Yahoo, and Bing. (if you have problem submitting your website to any search engine, don’t hesitate to leave  comment here and I’ll do my best to respond immediately to your questions)

SEO-Friendly Website Structure

A website must not only have an appealing design for human users; it must be SEO-friendly so that it will be much easier to optimize for search engines. This search engine optimization process goes by as you create the website. Actually, this is supposed to be first done before the actual on-page optimization (Alt Attributes, Header Tags, Meta Tags). I just wasn’t able to make a good article about it. Anyway, lets proceed on how to make an SEO-friendly website.

There are different things to remember to make a website an SEO-friendly one. One of this is to maximize the usage of CSS (Cascading Sheet Style). CSS (Cascading Sheet Style) gives us the ability to abstract the design out of a webpage, or site into a secondary document. This gives us a lot of advantages ( very few disadvantages!) by removing redundant design code from your website you place the content closer to the start of the document; while reducing your code to markup ratio. It also makes it easier, and more cost effective to maintain your website as you can implement simple design changes by only editing on file. Comparing a table-based design website and a tableless design website, the code of the second one was 40% – 50% less than the code of the first one. With much shorter code, the file size of a webpage is getting smaller; making search engines able to index the website more efficiently.

Another thing to do is to have an SEO-friendly URLs for your website. There are two types of URLs: dynamic URL and static URL. Dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site’s database. The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data is changed in the database. The problem in using dynamic URLs is that search engines don’t like dynamic URLs because of a specific number of variable strings (e.g.: ? & =). Another disadvantage on dynamic URLs is that dynamic pages generally do not have any keywords in the URL. (we all know that is very important to have keyword rich URLs.) Highly relevant keywords should appear in the domain name or the page URL.

On the other hands, Static URLs are URLs that doesn’t change, and doesn’t have variable strings. Static URLs are typically ranked better in search engine results pages, and they are indexed more quickly than dynamic URLs, if dynamic URLs get indexed at all. Static URLs are also easier for the end-user to view and understand what the page is about. If a user sees a URL in a search engine query that matches the title and description, they are more likely to click on that URL than one that doesn’t make sense to them. Here is an example of a dynamic URL and static URL:

http://www.domain.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=8&view=basic (Dynamic URL)
http://www.domain.com/2009/10/01/keyword1-keyword2-keyword3/ (Static URL)

Now, how to resolve the issue on dynamic URL? You need to do a URL Rewriting. I don’t have enough knowledge about this topic; since this more about programming. For you to understand what is URL Rewriting and how to do it, I provide a video discussing on how to create an SEO friendly URL using UrlRewrite Module in IIS7:

Also, I provide some tools recommended for making an SEO-friendly web design and URL:

Web Developer for FireFox – a Firefox extension adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.

CSS Validator – this validator checks the CSS validity of a website.

Mark Up Validator – this validator checks the markup validity  of Web documents in HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, etc. If you wish to validate specific content such as RSS/Atom feeds or CSS stylesheets, MobileOK content, or to find broken links, there are other validators and tools available.

URL Rewriting Tool – this tool implement the Mod Rewrite Rule in your .htaccess file to secretly convert a URL to another, such as with dynamic and static ones.

I hope this tutorial and tools will help you make your website even more SEO friendly.

Keyword Research: Critical Step In SEO

Keyword research is the practice used by SEO professionals to find actual “search terms” people tend to enter into the search engines when conducting a search for a specific thing. Keyword research is a very vital procedure in SEO. It’s where search engine optimization starts. The success or failure of search engine optimization depends on how good or bad your keyword research for your website. If your website is selling products or rendering services and you made choose the appropriate keywords for your website, search engines will see its relativity when a user (who is your potential customer, too) hit a search query with your keywords on it.

The first thing to do when conducting a keyword research is brainstorming. List down all the potential keywords your customer might type in in search box. Mix up 3 to 4 single keyword to come up with with keyphrase (phrase composed of keywords) your customers might tend to use as search query. You can do it either with your self alone or with a group.

After the brainstorming, you need to filter your listed keywords / keyphrases using keywords suggestion tools. These tools will help you find out how often a keyword or keyphrase searched for (and get suggestions). There are lots of  keyword suggestion tools to choose from. Here is the list of keywords suggestion tools I’m recommending for you to use in your keyword research:

Keyword Discovery Keyword Suggestion Tool – this tool show how many users search for a specific keyword based on monthly search query. It also identify common spellings and misspellings, and discover which terms are impacted by seasonal trends (mostly useful for PPC).

Google Insights Geo-Targeted Suggestion Tool – this tool provided by Google will help you know which keywords are commonly used based on your targeted period within a given period (i.e., the HOT KEYWORDS for the past 3 months). Very useful in geo targeted optimization / marketing.

Free Word Tracker – like Keyword Discovery Keyword Suggestion Tool, this tool show how many users search for a specific keyword; it can also identify common spellings and misspellings. The only difference is that it show search query volume on daily basis. (not monthly search query)

Google Search Engine – Google itself can suggest related search term on your given keywords / keyphrases.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool – a keyword suggestion tools used for PPC program; webmasters can create their own ads and choose keywords.

Keep in mind that you’re not only checking to see if enough people are searching for a particular word, you’re also trying to determine how competitive that phrase is in terms of rankings. There are two things to pay attention to when making this decision: how many other sites are competing for the same word and how strong are those sites’ rankings. Yes, keyword suggestion tools might give you keywords or keyphrases with high search query volume, but if you are about to compete for more than hundred millions of competitors, you better think twice before using such keywords like that.

Next after filtering your keywords using keyword suggestion tools is polishing more the list of keywords. You need to filter out your filtered keywords so that you’ll know which is the best among the rest. To do this, make a spreadsheet listing all your keywords on the first column, their corresponding search query volume on the second column, and the number of competitors on the third column. Start by highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and theme of your web site. Take into consideartion also the search query volume over the number of competitors. Those keywords that are far related about your website and you think is hard to compete with is need to be deleted. Then, from these remaining keywords, create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. You’ll need both to rank well. Yes, broad terms are important because they describe what your web site is all about; however, they won’t increase the level of qualified traffic coming into your site.

Let’s make this blog as an example. This blog is about SEO, right? I might tend to rank in “SEO” and/or “search engine optimization” keywords. Targeting these keywords alone might give me high traffic but not from my targeted audience. By only targeting broad terms, customers won’t know what my blog is all about not until they land on my site. So, what I need to do now is that I need to rank also in much specific keywords like “search engine optimization tutorials” or “search engine optimization tips” (something like that). Targeted terms are often easier to rank for and help bring qualified traffic.Targeted terms strengthen the theme created with the broader phrases.

Keyword research is very important; pay enough time and effort studying which keywords is best to use. These keywords will play a big role in your whole search engine optimization process.