Archive for the 'Search Engines' category

When you look for images, you often want to find pictures not only based on a keyword, but find something similar to one of the results shown. Live Search and Google offer such technologies.

YLovePhoto describes such image seach engines based on similarity.

Useful to populate your web site with exactly the right image/picture/photo content.

You don’t know it before you try, but many visitors arriving on your web site do not find immediately what they are loking for. It may be that Google did not direct them perfectly or that they remember seeing something useuful and they can’t find it anymore. So you need to help them.

Let me offer two good options:

1. If your web site software integrates a search engine, like WordPress, use it.


2. In any case, you can easily setup a Google AdSense account and -on top of the advertising capacity- you will get access to their search engine for your web site.

LinkVoodo has a very useful tool to evaluate the visibility of your web site and (maybe) understand why it is so well or so badly recognized by search engines. The Quality Score Analyzer or Quality Rank Tool tries to judge the quality of your web site as it is seen by the other web sites. It not only give a not-very-informative score (a single figure will not sum it up), but detailled informations showing what it is really expecting. A few examples:

• Visibility in terms of Social Bookmarking (Digg, Reddit)
• Presence in the Web Directories (DMOZ, Yahoo!)

I recently did a real world experiment about Google News Sitemap that I think would be interesting to share. You may remember about Google Sitemaps. These are XML documents that you create to describe your web site to search engines. The main advantage is that Google or Yahoo! no longer need to be spidering all the links of your web site to find all of its pages: You point at each page individually, you ease their job. This is important for web sites with very obscure and/or deep links where some pages may be missed. If your web site is not too badly written, it’s interesting but not critical. It helps things done…

Google News Sitemap is an entirely different thing. It’s a way to submit news articles to Google News. Since this is becoming an excellent source of information for many users, it may be critical to meet the expectations of Google in order to collect a significant amount of highly targetted visits from this search engine.

And, this is relatively easy. You have to publish a sitemap which is following a stricter set of rules (compared to the more usual sitemaps). Two solutions: Either you build it manually (I would not recommend this), or you use one of the good plugins available.

I recently started using Google News Sitemap Generator by Chris Jinks and David Stansbury on several of my WordPress-based web sites. They rank from obscure to relatively well visited (up to several thousands visits per day). And I wondered what the effect would be.

Google Analytics shows visits increase on www.YLoveBigCats.com

I can easily recommend using Google News Sitemaps: A few days after starting publishing it, I got a very noticeable visit increase on all of these web sites. It was fully simultaneous (on the day Google starting using them less than a week after initial publication) and was producing +10% to +40% increase. I never had a single operation of that kind, done in so small amount of work leading to so many more visits.

Remember that the easiest and safest way to disseminate the sitemap you just created for your web site: Include it in the robots.txt file of your site. Very simple! Add a line like:

Sitemap: http://ywantvisits.com/en/sitemap.xml.gz

Adding a sitemap to your web site is a good way to achieve several important goals for your web site’s visibility:

1. Make sure that some difficult to access pages are kept visible to search engines (SEO)
2. Ease publication of your pages to major search engines not relying on their crawling from one page to the next to find everything at once

I would not dare say that this is easy, but it can be quite powerful. And some search engines essentially need sitemaps (MSN Live, Ask.com come to mind).

Google Webmaster Tools: Sitemap

Unfortunately, if the sitemap is relatively easy to read (this is XML text), it is also quite easy to misunderstand or to fail when writing it (this is XML, remember?). So, I would suggest checking the following resources before diving into it. I tried to sort them in the order of your discovery of sitemaps and your activities to build them.

• A good introduction to Google XML Sitemaps from Wikipedia: It is recommended to start and discover the issues.
• Google’s Sitemaps guideline
• A sitemap validator is absolutely needed to ensure that your sitemaps are 100% understandable by the search engines.
• Google Webmaster Tools is the right place to publish your web site’s sitemap to Google. But it also contains useful analysis tools and will confirm the quality of the sitemap submission.

Interestingly, if you are on WordPress there are very good sitemap generator plugins (this is also true of most other blog software). I would recommend XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress 3.1.2 whose wealth of options make it very adaptable and which is very fast and clean.

It’s always been a bit difficult to get a good ranking at the Yahoo! search engine. One of the most difficult tasks is to ensure that your web site is even considered. Most of the times, you will find people advising you to pay the fee that Yahoo! requests. Unfortunately, this often leads to money lost (at least for the web sites which are not obviously important to their target market: Microsoft does not need to pay to be considered).

Since Yahoo! will consider the visibility of your web site first, it is usually important to start getting some visibility where Yahoo! will see you easily. One of the best and most accessibe locations for this is the My.Yahoo page. You can easily setup your own personalized home page at my.yahoo.com. It’s only a matter of going there and use your own Yahoo identifier or to create one.

My.Yahoo.com

After that, your Yahoo! home page becomes available and then you have the possibility to use one interesting feature: Adding an RSS feed to your page.

Adding an RSS feed

If you add an RSS feed of your web site, it will be read regularly by Yahoo!’s robots in order to be displayed on your page. Of course, it is important to recognize that the search engine spider is not the same software and just doing this is not enough to ensure a good ranking (if only it has some impact). But it starts getting Yahoo! some knowledge of your site and it is widely considered as one of the easiest method to initiate your communication with this important search engine.

Free Bonus: It can also serve as a way to check the validity of your RSS feed: Does a standard RSS reader recognize your feed?

Under the name of “Canonical Link Element” is hidden the common creation of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo: A way to reduce the duplicate contents as seen by search engines, to help them understand that www.example.com or example.com or www.example.com/index.html are actually the same page under different names.

To know more, I invite you to listen to Google’s Matt Cutts video presentation.

If you use WordPress to build your wbe site or your blog (and I recommend it heartily), there is a small setting to apply and not to forget.

To ease the job of the search engine, WordPress proposes to set a specific format for permalinks (go and check Settings / Permalinks) other than the default proposition. You have to admit that the default address form are hard to swallow, even for a search engine: http://www.ywantvisits.com/en/?p=123

So, there is much better…

Personally, I recommend choosing one the two other offered solutions:

• Soit http://www.ywantvisits.com/en/2008/11/30/wordpress-dont-forget-permalinks/
• Soit http://www.ywantvisits.com/en/2008/11/wordpress-dont-forget-permalinks/

The most important part is that the title of the post is preserved with clear keywords -it will help th search engine identify and classify the post- but even more important is that the initial default form is hard to decode for most search engines. They would merely ignore your posts. Wouldn’t it be a pity?

And I don’t mean to check what are the keywords written up in the headers of the HTML pages. This is supposed to be a great way to improve search engine ranking. It may have been true, but it’s no longer really important (search engine do not believe what you freely write there, they prefer what they can infer from the actual content and the other web sites).

However, the logs and analysis of your web site trafic should be able to give you a good idea of what kind of trafic is attracted to your web site. Search engines are already bringing visitors in. You must know why they are coming in. At least for the following reasons:

• Those visitors may come for a reason and may have found what they were looking for. Or not
• They may come attracted to what you intended to offer, or they may have discovered a little pearl in your web site

From the list of search key words, you will be able to develop several strategies (you probably want to play them all):

• Produce content specificially to increase the attractivity of your web site on these key words. It’s often relatively easy since there is already some good content; Just write more stories strictly about the issue.
• Knowing that some of the keywords may be a little surprise, you may also want to understand why the original target of your webs ite is not coming to you. Try and develop content that is more in line with it. Analyse why some keywords work better than others (you may be the only one to write about the issue, or you may be writing better content for some key words tan for the others).

This becomes the first steps in Optimizing your Site for Search Engine. No! the first steps in Optimizing your content for your visitors.

Final note: Did I mention that -usually- you get very good advertising results from those surprising keywords. They are so strongly targetted that Ads are also very strong (and often bringing a relatively high income).