All About GoogleWritten by Courtney Heard
If you read The Search Engine Showdown at www.abalone.ca/resources/searchenginetest.html, you know Google is my favourite search engine. Why? Google always offers most results for any given search (they currently have over 8 billion pages indexed), it's faster than Audi Quattro we test drove this morning, and 9 times out of ten, in my experience, all front page results are relevant to my search. In fact, I usually find what I'm looking for within first few sites listed. I also really respect fact that two college kids started it (kinda like Abalone!) and that those two college kids seem not to have forgotten where they came from. If you check out images at Google's press center (http://www.google.com/press/images.html) and scroll down to Everyday Life Inside Google section, you'll get a feeling that life at Google is fun.Google is most used search engine on web. In May, 2004, 36.8% of all searches on web were done using Google. Also during that month, Google powered 54% of all searches done on web. Google owes their success to their mind-boggling algorithm. This intricate formula sucks in a web page, considers its keyword density, its link popularity, domain name, how often it is updated, amount of content in site, and a myriad of other things that few know and spits out a number called PageRank. There is absolutely no way to be sure how to get your site to number one on Google, but there are a few things that we know can help: 1. Make sure your site is well organized, visitor friendly and useful. Google seems to like sites that are listed in Open Directory Project, and my theory is that it's because Open Directory Project is human edited. This means real human eyes have looked at each site that is included in directory and deemed it useful in some way or another. If your site has a link on The Open Directory Project, you're on right track. 2. Avoid "spamming". Spamming refers to many different things. If you add keywords to your site that are out of context or hidden from plain view, it's considered spamming. Resubmitting your site to Google can be looked upon as spamming. The basic principal is to make sure every page on your site is professional looking, clean, organized and has its own unique information to offer.
| | The Meta Tag MythWritten by Bobby Heard
The more better right? Wrong. At least when it comes to meta tags. The history of meta tag started off as a nice tool that web sites could use to show search engines what site was about without words showing up on actual page. It seemed like a great idea until people started to abuse meta tag. They would add highly searched for keywords that were unrelated to their site in their meta tags in hopes of attracting additional traffic. The search engines caught on and lowered importance of meta tags - they figured out that if they put more emphasis on visible content of a site, people would have a much more difficult time "cheating". Turns out that they were right.Now, don’t get me wrong, meta tags still do carry some significance. They need to be consistent with content of your site, but most importantly they’re somewhat of a measure of legitimacy of your site. The most common myth when it comes to search engine optimization is that best meta tag is one packed with most information. This couldn't be further from truth. The keyword meta tag has been abused more than any other meta tag and does not carry as much importance as most of others because of this reason. Most search engines only read first few characters of tag, if they read it at all, because they know that most keyword meta tags are filled with spam - Just same words repeated over and over. That is why it’s important to get your most important keywords to front of your keyword meta tag.
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