Mastering The Google Dance And The Use Of Page Rank

The update of the Google index is often referred to as the Google dance. For several days when Google is updating their index to include new pages and update their algorithms, search results almost seem to take on a life of their own. High positioned sites have been known to drop into near obscurity while the lesser-judged sites suddenly find themselves careering towards dizzy heights in the rankings. While this phenomenon is usually relatively short lived, lasting only two or three days, many webmasters take it to be a sign of things to come during the next major update. Spurious Search Engine Results Google uses a number of patented algorithms to determine the exact ranking of every indexed website. They also attempt to index as many websites and pages as they can possibly find. In order to do this they utilize tens of thousands of different hosts and over a dozen data centers. It is impossible for Google to update each and every one of these at the same time and it is also impossible for them to alternate between using old data and the new updated data. This leads to some potentially skewed results in their listings. However, these results are not usually indicative of future rankings. Relying Too Heavily On Toolbar PR The problem for many webmasters is an over reliance on the toolbar page rank. This is a problem for several reasons. Page rank isn’t the be all and end all of search engine rankings. It is used to determine the weight of an inbound link, meaning that a link from a page with a PR5 is much better than a link from a page with PR2. However, having a PR6 won’t necessarily mean that your site will list above all the PR4 sites on the web. Relevancy Of Website Content The logic is fairly simple. The PR of your site is a numerical value determined by numerous factors including the number of inbound links. In no way can this numerical ranking indicate the relevance of your website content when looking at a particular search term. Having a PR6 website does not necessarily mean that your site bears more relevance to a particular term than another website with a PR2. So, as well as the PR of your website, Google must also consider the topic and the content of your site and how relevant this is to the relevant search term. Toolbar PR Compared To Live PR Another problem is that the toolbar PR is only updated every three months or so, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. While you’re seeing that your site only has a PR2 it could be that it actually has a PR closer to 5. Your site will receive the credit from this “live” PR in preference to that of the toolbar PR so don’t panic. A Final Word On The Google Dance During the time the Google dance is being completed, the servers located around different data centers are upgrading and updating one at a time. This is why some sites will show spurious results and why some webmasters benefit for a day or two while others lose out. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to prevent this Google phenomenon and there is nothing you can do to hurry the process up. All that is left is to sit back and watch in amazement as the Google index dances.

Harnessing The Power Of Social Book marking To Boost PageRank and Gather A Massive Number of Back links To Your Website

As SEO professionals we are constantly searching for ways to get our sites ranked and indexed better. We all know that backlinks are "life blood" that get a site ranked higher in the search engines.Black hat SEO experts in the quest to get one way backlinks till now relied on various methods like blog comment spam and referer log spam.The latest technique is using social bookmarking to get one way back links. What is social bookmarking? Social bookmarking is utilizing a web service, where users create a public repository of bookmarks pertaining to sites that they like.The concept of social bookmarking dates back to 1996 with the launch of itList.com, followed by services like Blink and Hotlinks and many more. But,the popularity of Social Bookmarking increased with the advent of the most popular bookmarking site till date, del.icio.us.To the uninitated, these bookmarks may seem like geekspeak, but from an SEO standpoint these can build you a massive amount of backlinks which seem tooriginate from authority sites. So how does one go about utilizing these social bookmarking services? You simply sign up for an account and then post your urls. Each post requires you to enter the url, a title for the anchor text, a short description and of course the tags under which you want your link bookmarked. A tag is a keyword which acts like a subject or category. Each user "tags" a webpage or image using his own unique tag. An image or webpage may have multiple tags that identify it. Webpages and images with identical tags are then linked together and users may use the tag to search for similar webpages and images. Most of these services give you a personalized book mark page that has all your bookmarks displayed, and though when you start out the pagerank of your personalized page might be zero, it slowly builds up over time. An additional important point worth looking at is that each tag page on the site has a pagerank which gets passed on to your site. For example the page for the tag "advertising" has a pagerank of 3. Below is a list of various services that you can utilize to boost your page rank 1) http://del.icio.us/ : This one of the most popular of all social bookmarking sites and has a huge pagerank of 8. 2) http://digg.com: Digg is a technology news website where users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do. Digg is a site with a pagerank of 7 3) http://www.reddit.com, Page Rank 7 4)http://www.blinklist.com, page rank 6 5) http://www.simpy.com, page rank 6 A great way to get visitors to your sites to bookmark your website is using a neat service available at http://ekstreme.com/socializer/. This service provides a small snippet of code that when added to your site creates a special link on your site. When any visitor clicks on this link they are provided with a large list of social bookmarking sites which they can add your site to. In case your website is a wordpress blog a similar wordpress plugin called Sociable that can be found at http://push.cx/sociable Thus, using social bookmarking you can improve the ranking of your website and gain valuable pagerank.

Why? - Page Rank

What is Page Rank ? In short Page Rank is a "vote", by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there's no link there's no support (but it's an abstention from voting rather than a vote against the page). How is Page Rank Used? Page Rank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page's relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and Page Rank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own. Page Rank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you've installed the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/). But the Toolbar Page Rank only goes from 0 - 10 and seems to be something like a logarithmic scale: Toolbar Page Rank: (log base 10) Real Page Rank 0 0 - 10 1 100 - 1,000 2 1,000 - 10,000 3 10,000 - 100,000 4 and so on... We can't know the exact details of the scale because, as we'll see later, the maximum PR of all pages on the web changes every month when Google does its re-indexing! If we presume the scale is logarithmic (although there is only anecdotal evidence for this at the time of writing) then Google could simply give the highest actual PR page a toolbar PR of 10 and scale the rest appropriately. Also the toolbar sometimes guesses! The toolbar often shows me a Toolbar PR for pages I've only just uploaded and cannot possibly be in the index yet! What seems to be happening is that the toolbar looks at the URL of the page the browser is displaying and strips off everything down the last "/" (i.e. it goes to the "parent" page in URL terms). If Google has a Toolbar PR for that parent then it subtracts 1 and shows that as the Toolbar PR for this page. If there's no PR for the parent it goes to the parent's page, but subtracting 2, and so on all the way up to the root of your site. If it can't find a Toolbar PR to display in this way, that is if it doesn't find a page with a real calculated PR, then the bar is greyed out. Note that if the Toolbar is guessing in this way, the Actual PR of the page is 0 - though its PR will be calculated shortly after the Google spider first sees it. PageRank says nothing about the content or size of a page, the language it's written in, or the text used in the anchor of a link! Definitions I've started to use some technical terms and shorthand in this paper. Now's as good a time as any to define all the terms I'll use: PR: Shorthand for PageRank: the actual, real, page rank for each page as calculated by Google. As we'll see later this can range from 0.15 to billions. Toolbar PR: The PageRank displayed in the Google toolbar in your browser. This ranges from 0 to 10. Backlink: If page A links out to page B, then page B is said to have a "backlink" from page A. Visit us: http://www.halfvalue.com/top-articles/seo-resources.html

Google Page Rank Is Dead - Part III

Is it really dead?

In an online forum post from WebProWorld.com (A discussion on Google), people from all over are speculating about what is going on. In fact, one member was quick to point out that the last big shift Google had, we saw the PR system go down as well. This begs the question...

Are we on the verge of a BIG PR shift? or,
Are we seeing a Google marketing scheme just to shake people up?

In many ways, Google needs to be improved upon their "broken down PR system". There are so many areas if they payed attention to forums and blogs all around the world, they would have more than enough feedback about their PR system to fix this growing PR issue.

Page ranking is a potentially a great system. It CAN be a great system if it directly ranks websites properly by content, relevance, and not simply by the number of links pointing to an individual website.

These days, you see a website with 15 "medium relevant" links pointing to it while its front page holds a PR of 7-8 out of 10. How do you justify that?

What will it mean if Google's PR systems stays down?

I believe it will mean a big shift to online marketing. Many newbies out there that are barely legal when it comes to SEO have an opportunity to measure everything they do. In turn, the newbies may even sound professional to their clients. Take away these tools and you are left with true marketing gurus that have stood the test of time and can deliver results for themselves and their clients.

The internet is vastly growing into a pool of professional fakes and scammers. This is really giving the internet marketing community a bad name. Without the Google PR, many people won't be able to prove their results nor will they have that "fake respect" that you get from having a website with PR 7/10.

What about MSN & Yahoo?

In growing efforts to keep up with MSN & Yahoo's strong and growing marketing campaign, Google may be feeling left out these days. Many people think that their PR system is simply a gimmick; a gimmick that attracts a lot of attention. By disabeling this system, you create mass fear and confusion. Bad publicity is still publicity neverless?

So, is Google trying to create a buzz?

This could be possible and it could be possible that everything will be back to normal within a couple of days. We won't know until time catches up with us.

Until then, take this "dark saga" moment and find other ways to build your business online. Don't worry about what Google is doing, worry about what you are doing to improve your internet marketing campaign.

When Will Google Update The Page Rank Of Older Sites?

There has been another page rank update in the last couple of weeks but it seems as though this has only affected sites which previously had a page rank of zero. The question many people are asking is when will google update the page rank of all of the other sites which already showed a page rank?

This latest update seems to be very similar to the previous page rank update in which the older sites were also not updated. When reading on various websites about other webmasters opinions on this current trend, I have found a number of reasons as to why this may be happening.

Over the last couple of years there have been quite a large number of link exchange programs which have been created. This have proven to be quite popular but are frowned upon by google as the people who enter these programs are in a way cheating to get to the top. Most people are aware of the importance of backward links and these link exchange programs make it very easy to obtain them. In clearly states however in the google guidelines that webmasters should not take part in these link exchange programs. Webmasters who still go ahead are at risk at having their site or sites banned.

The problem could be that it is very hard for search engines like google to establish which links that each site obtains are from these link exchanges and which links are actual real and valid links. It is possible that google is close to finding a formula to this problem and is delaying any page rank updates on older sites until all of the finishing touches are completed. My advice would be to never take part in any of these link exchange programs and that if you are currently in one, to come out of it as soon as possible.

There are many valid ways of promoting a website such as via writing articles and by having good content which will encourage other webmasters to want to link to your site.

I have to say that for somebody like myself who works very hard to promote my own websites, that it is quite frustrating to not be able to see the changes in the page rank, as when I see my sites go up in page rank it gives me a little boost and shows me that I am still doing the right things. In a way it should not really matter however as I am able to see my websites have higher rankings in the search engines, this itself of course is the most important thing. It is also a good thing that google are trying to stop the people who are trying to cheat their way to the top, that is of course if this is the real reason why there has not been a full page rank update for some time.

Google gives more importance to scientific articles

The Google Page Rank algorithm, also known as PR, seems to give more importance to the impact of a scientific article rather than to it’s quoting number.

For the ones that don’t know, traditionally, to measure an article’s importance there the method is to have “citing number”, meaning all the times that that article has been quoted by somebody else. The idea is that if many different people quote an article, this means that this article is worth while and important. Well, apparently Google isn’t looking only to this, but also to the content of the article.

Researchers have found out that the Google algorithm, when measuring a web site’s importance , offers a systematic method to find important articles . The google index proved better that the traditional method to find the really good scientific articles, that were’t that much quoted by others but which were proven to be of a very high value.

Sidney Redner and Pu Chen from the University of Boston and Huafeng Xie and Sergei Maslov from the National Laboratory of Brookhaven found out that certain articles that proved to be very influential . Like the article of Wigner and Seitz, from 1933 "On the Constitution of Metallic Sodium" , which is now University book regular content. Another example is the article of Gauber from 1963 about "Photon Correlations", which receive the Nobel Prize last year. These articles weren’t known using the regular quoting algorithm, but shower up very high in google and were given a very high PR.

The way google does it is by allowing his spiders to dig deep into the quoting web and see how many times the article that quoted the first article was quoted, and so on, meaning that if the article that quoted your article is of great value, also your article increases in value.

Google PR Explained

PR is a measure of how ‘important’ a page is (according to Google). For the purpose of this article, I will only discuss PR in the SEO context – what it means and how to use it.

First things first: PR is not the cause or the result of high rankings.

PR depends mainly on 2 things: Incoming links and traffic. Some SEOs make the mistake of assuming high rankings come as a result of high PR, when in fact high PR is one natural outcome of high rankings.

Better SEO = higher rankings = more traffic = Higher PR

However, the concept behind Google’s PR is crucial when working with External Links (i.e.: incoming) and Internal Links (i.e.: the website’s structure). Every link from A to B is considered as a ‘vote of confidence/credibility’ from A to B. We can use PR as a physical measurement of how this credibility travels from one URL to the next.

The role of SEO in this case is…

1. Off-site: to maximise incoming PR by increasing the number of incoming links and the quality of incoming links.
2. On-site: to harness incoming PR so that none of it is wasted (on broken links) and that most of it is channelled to the most important pages of the website (i.e.: the homepage, main category pages)

To sum up, PR isn’t a factor in SEO, neither is it a direct result of SEO. But the makings of a high-PR website are very similar to those of a high-ranking website. And because of that, the concept of PR can be used to...

• properly apply linking techniques
• measure the effectiveness of these techniques

The Basics of Blogging and Web Site Creation - Part Two: Introduction To Keywords

Okay so now we know content is king. And of course since we are creating our own blogs, (remember blogs is short slang for Weblogs - which is what their "formal and official" name is), most of our information is going to be "unique" and "Original". Yet every now and then, since we are only human, and since we simply cannot "create" more and more information, we will copy information from other web sites. That is cool. There is no problem with that, UNLESS, you decide that "copying" and/or "linking" is simply better and forego writing anything.

Now let me make this clear. If you are offering a service to people, where your main business is to offer out links to other places where people can get information, in other words you are a repository where people come to get links, because you already did all the research - that is fine. Because what you will loose in content, you will make up in "eyeballs" and "hits". Remember the end result of good search engine listings is just that. MORE HITS - MORE EYEBALLS - MORE PEOPLE VISITING. And content is not the only parameter an Search Engine looks at. Not by a long shot.

This is a critical point to keep in mind. Everything we will talk about, every method, from content to email to lists to whatever, (hehe my most unfavorite word in the English language pops in - Whatever - see my post on that word in my blog), has but one goal in mind. To consistently and constantly increase and build your website "hits". To make sure you have an ever-growing "fan" club "motivated" because of the service you are offering, to come back. So please differentiate between the end goal and the methods. Content (discussed in our first article) is a method towards the goal of getting listed in a good position on a search engine, and the goal is to have people use and come to your web site or blog, and create a "buzz" about it. (We will talk about this much later in our series.)

Let us go back to content for a moment. Here we are talking about something that all writers know about and are familiar with. Text, words, phrases. Original, unique text.

So in order to continue on our own fairly logical path, we will now concentrate on the "text" and what has to be in it. Which brings us to the subject of "keywords". Before explaining just what these are and either their importance or total invalidity and worthlessness these days, (and this is up for debate) let us define keywords more carefully.

If you have a website selling hair beauty aids, you will want to sell your material writing content around what you are selling. Obviously if you write something about the difference between different models of dishwashers, this is not going to relate to the "subject matter" and content of your site. So you will write articles around your hair supplies. You will write articles on good hair care, on how to dye your hair, how to get rid of split-ends, how often to shampoo etc. etc.

Our magic hair website is called "Hair Is Not Forever", and it is at www.hairisnotforever.com (I have no clue if such a site exists so please don't hit that link!) But this is our site for now and we will keep it as we go along. hairisnotforever also has a blog. This blog we will call "SilkyFairHair" and we will put it, for the sake of our example in blogger.com under the name of the proprietor who is aptly named Mr. Nor Hair. So now we have as follows:

1. Web Site - Hair Forever @ www.hairisnotforever.com
2. Blog - SilkyFairHair @ http://norhair.bl.com (this URL is fictional)

These names ARE important and so are the URL's. (URL stands for Universal Resource Locater). So keep them in mind as we go along through these articles especially when I get to the article on the importance of finding the right name.

So Mr. Nor Hair and his wife, Mrs. Purple Hair work together. They create the site, get all the necessary stuff to sell something on it, write a couple of articles about hair and sit back and wait for the people to come beating their "virtual" door down. Well as we say in Hebrew, "Boker Tov" (which literally means "Good Morning"), or as you say in English, "Knock. Knock. Good Morning! Anyone Home?"

Okay the Hair couple know about keywords. So they create articles in which EVERY sentence has the word hair in it (or balding). But hair is the name of the game. They make sure their content is original, and once they have written two HTML pages of hair articles, strategically placed by their cousin the graphic artist (who is bald) around the advertisements for hair products and now they think they are done!

Woah! Not by a LONG SHOT! And here is where it gets depressing for the uninitiated and non-dedicated people.

Let us deal with the "keyword" issue.
Keywords are like indices or if you wish, categories. A keyword is something that the search engine will look for and validate (in our day), to use as one of the parameters as to how to list your site.

The keywords we refer to are in two distinct and totally different places. The first in the page header of the site.
in what is known as the section for "meta" tags. We will deal with meta tags in a different article, however let us just say these are the keywords most search engine look for (with their "bots") when visiting your site.
An example meta tag for keywords on our site may look like this:

Again in our article(s) on meta tags we will discuss these keywords, and meta tags, but for now take it as a given these are some of the keywords that will be in the meta tag.

When the Search Engine technology first became popular and meta tags were implemented, the keywords tag was critical. Search Engines looked at the keywords in the meta tag and assumed that was what the site was about and listed the site under those keywords. This was caught on to immediately, and humans being the crafty devils they are, began listing keywords that had nothing to do with their sites in order to drive traffic to the site. (Remember - the end result is the oh-so-important one: Hits & Eyeballs)

So porn sites especially, adopting this as yet another "fool the engine" technique, would put keywords like "hair", "technology" etc. into their meta tags, and give the site an innocuous name and voila, more traffic.

So in the never-ending battle Search Engines caught on, and did a few things. They deprecated the importance of the keywords in the meta tags according to their algorithms, UNLESS the content on the site actually did match the keywords. Of course, this was not enough as porn sites will put "real" content around their stuff. I will give you a REAL example which I find funny, but it is very serious.

In one of my posts on my blog, you can see my bio which is picked up by search engines. The other day I received an email from an old flame of mine saying "I freaked out. I googled you, under Ted Gross Writer, and you are connected with a site about tushy's!" So I go and Google it, and sure enough in like the fifth position is this: "Ted Gross's Unofficial Bio - The Real Version by Tushy" and of course I click and get led to another site (no url here as I do not want to publicize that site for obvious reasons) and I come to a porn site which ripped off, out of all the content on the internet, MY profile to place around their porn adverts. UGH! But you see that is how crafty people are!

(Here we are not going to talk about "splogs" - meaning "spam blogs" yet. But keep it in mind.)

Okay now what happens - not in theory but in practice.

Two scenarios:
1. You have keywords in your meta tag (and you should have them!) The little Search Engine "bot" (that is a software program whose job it is to travel around the Internet, never sleeps and never eats and gets into all those porn sites too!, and picks up information on ALL sites so the information can be categorized), comes to our site of hairisnotforever and reads the keywords on the page. Then this little bot makes a snapshot of the web page. Then the algorithms take over and match the keywords in the meta tags to the text and stuff on your site. (Remember Search Engines don't "see", they are NOT visual (males are visually oriented not Search Engines!) so graphics are not taken into account unless you use the alt tag.) The algorithms get more and more sophisticated as time goes on and they look for content, keywords, phrases etc. (Remember original content!)

2. You have no keywords in your meta tag so the engine just looks at your content.

So our happy couple figures okay lets put the word hair say, in every sentence at least three times. NO! Don't do that. Overuse of a keyword is a red-flag to a Search Engine and you will be penalized for it! It should be used and used frequently, but NOT overused.

Now when you Google for hair products using the word "balding", the Search Engine has the keyword, and based upon a million parameters decides what position for that specific keyword, hairisnotforever will have, and feeds it out.

So our couple figures what the hell. We will also sell mascara, and they put in a picture advert and the word mascara in their keywords, without having any content for it. Well then www.hairisnotforever.com will probably be listed as the last of the last of the last for anyone looking for "mascara".
So for this lesson the formula is:

"Content+Keywords in the content+Keywords in Meta tag."

Part Three - Keywords, Tags, Categories - Oh Vey! I Am So Mixed Up!

Okay so now we know all there is to know about content and keywords. Hah! But you did get the basics. It may be a good point to stop and talk about Keywords, Tags, Categories and all that as well. Logically, in progression this should come much later, but because there seems such misunderstandings about Technorati, Del.icio.us and other tagging systems, it may be a good place to put this down.

These articles began because of a thread at Absolute Write called "What Is Your Technorati Rank?" On perusing that thread I realized that many writers were placing their hopes in something that just was not going to happen. More so, they were actually misreading the importance of certain "rankings" and thus ignoring the more important factors.

If you read the previous articles in this series you now hopefully understand "keyword basics". So we are going to use Technorati for our example.

So along comes techie #1 and says:

"Hey, you know what. Blogs are becoming mainstay business. They are great for people with no knowledge of HTML and you can literally put up a web-site Weblog in minutes. So now they are multiplying over the net faster than rabbits, and the Search Engines are ignoring them for the most part as most of them contain personal musings and ramblings. So why not create a sophisticated search engine for blogs?"

"Great idea," says techie #2, "a search engine from blogs. And that means anyone who has a blog will want to register with us. But how are we going to build it. Obviously, normative search engine technology is not what we want."

"You know what?" says techie #1 "we are going to take keywords, call them by a different name and create a closed system!"

And thus Technorati was born.

What essentially goes on in Technorati, is you define what you write with "tags", Technorati tags. These are keywords, (with a special HTML parameter). Keywords just like you will learn to use in your meta tags. Technorati then in a CLOSED SYSTEM connects all the blogs with the same keywords. Technorati does not look at content to a great extent (to my knowledge), they pay attention to the tags re: keywords that you input. If you do not input keywords they use your keywords in your Blog setup.

Okay this is great for all those people looking for blogs say about hairdressing. So they come to Mr. & Mrs. Hair's blog because the Hair couple input keywords as Technorati tags. Simple.

Technorati now goes one step further. Technorati rates your blog based upon a few parameters. One of those "important" parameters is how many other people in the Technorati Network (Only those IN the network, or those using Technorati tags) have linked to your blog or a post on it. So by gaining links (there is no concept on Technorati as "bleeding links" as far as I know), you move up in the ladder. But even Technorati also keeps track of how popular your blog is. You can have 200 links into your blog, but if no one visits then your standing will not go up to the top 100.

Okay, that is Technorati. Important for bloggers? Well it is a popular site, and growing. So the answer would be yes. Important for Google, MSN and Yahoo --- not on its own...yet there is one critical Caveat.

When someone links to your site in a blog or web site, the href HTML links are in the code. The Search Engines when they read the code with their bots (see how much web lingo you know already!) sees these links. Those get added to the amount of sites linking to you. They are "hot links" or "back links" into your blog or posts in your blog. So linking not only works in the closed world of Technorati tags, but also works in the Wide World of Search Engine placement. Those links are important. Now if you get linked in a very popular blog, that counts for a lot in the world of Search Engine placement. (As we discussed in the previous articles.)

So while it is nice to know your Technorati ranking is going up, what is IMPORTANT is to remember to use their tools of tagging and linking to get others to discover and link to your blog. That gets noticed by the Search Engines. Not immediately to be sure but if you are being hit a great deal and have links to you, sooner rather than later the Search Engines will pick up your blog and your keywords. They will NOT look at the Technorati tags though, they will look at your meta tag keywords and your content. (Oy Vey! so many things to remember)

Del.icio.us and others work on the same concept, though del.icio.us is more centralized and called a "social book-marking service". Just remember the rule of thumb:

The more sites that link to you and your post, no matter for what reason, the better it is for you and your position in the Search Engines.

Okay now what are Categories? Categories really belong in Wiki format, and this is not the scope or place to discuss Wiki and the technology behind it. I own a new Wiki site, and you are welcome to peruse JewishPedia because on a Wiki site you can view all the code to each article.

Categories in blogs (Wordpress implements them automatically) are a way to search for something. I have Categories in my blog, but this is a code implemented Category Listing in Google's blogger system, where when you click, the blog does a Google Blog search in my blog for all articles related to that word. And thus it depends on Google's specific Blog Search Engine (not their regular search engine).

Remember, Google and others have specific Blog search engines. It is important to be on the top in those as well, BUT for mainstream, if you are using a Blog for whatever reason, your goal is to be in the normative search engines as well, and in a good placement there.

So there you have it. Tags = Keywords. Technorati uses them in the closed world of Technorati. The employ linking counts as well. These keywords and links, if done correctly, are also very useful for Search Engine rankings if your blog is popular. deli.ci.ous uses them for "social" blogging.

So don't give up on Technorati. Just don't believe it is the golden answer to be good rankings in the Search Engines. It is but one of the myriad of possibilities.

"The more sites that link to you and your post, no matter for what reason, the better it is for you and your position in the Search Engines."

The Basics of Blogging and Web Site Creation - Part One: Content Is King

My fellow writers at the Absolute Writers Forum (known lovingly as the AW Water Cooler or just Cooler) are the reason for these next series of articles so I wish to thank them.

In the next few series of articles, I will try and deal with some of the very basic technical jargon and skills that one needs when facing this daunting world of web-site creation, blogging and getting listed and noticed by the Search Engines. Some of this I take from things I posted at AW and others from my own articles on Web Creation and still others from my own blog, Cobwebs Of The Mind.

Let us start with the few important factors that are required today on the web. There are quadrillions of articles on this, most very poorly written, but the message is always the same.

On the web today, "content is king". But that is not all their is to that rule. Let us change it a bit to fit the reality of the web, search engines, and the sophisticated algorithms being deployed by the search engine trinity of: Google, Yahoo & MSN.

"Content is King, but Original Content is the King of Kings."

Okay - that is the first cardinal rule you MUST understand about the web today. Now what does this mean?

There are essentially three factors in this equation:


1. You must have content - words, phrases, information - on your web site.

2. You should have "original" content on your web site. This is content which either you have created or have gotten permission to reproduce on your web site. It should be "original". Copying content from a web site, and putting it in your blog, where that content has been reproduced in thousands of other web-sites, is not going to help your Google ranking (and you may even be penalized for it.) This does NOT mean that everything, every single phrase and post and article you put up on the web has to be original and not repeated elsewhere. What it does mean though, is that the majority of your web site or blog should be just that - YOURS.

3. Your content should constantly grow. You should be adding to it on a daily or bi-daily basis. Stagnant blogs and web sites are noticed for being stagnant - dead. They drop so fast in Search Engine (search engine) rankings you have no clue! Web sites demand nurturing and work. They do NOT run on auto mode. (Just look at how much time you spend with your blog!)


Now as to why and how.

Search Engines look for content. They have developed very sophisticated algorithms to check content. To see if this content is original, or they are coming across the millionth time they have seen the same thing. This is all mathematical btw. And this is NOT the only thing they look that. (We will get to those other things in our next posts). However, Content is critical. Lets give two examples.

1. Ever notice how fast some popular Forums get indexed in the Search Engines. This is due to the fact that they have an incredible amount of page hits, and that they exist for POSTS. Posts on forums are ORIGINAL for the most part. So engines look for the Content, forums have this, they list them, they see original content - the forum moves up the list, and thus more people find the forum in the search, more people hit the forum pages, more "hits" and "eyeballs" are registered back on the Search Engine servers, and the forum keeps on moving up. The more hits - by mathematics - the more posts. The more posts the more original content. The more original content the better the listing. The better the listing - the more people find the forum. Getting the picture? A never-ending circle of success.

2. For those of you in doubt as to whether Search Engines can "read" content just take a look at Adsense and Adwords. When you go to a site with them, adverts are fed out based upon the: 1: Content of the page you are on, and 2) Your IP address to determine which country and language you speak. Since I am in Israel, I am never surprised if I hit a site say that is discussing a topic and has adsense, and though this site is totally in English and geared to people in New York City, some of the adsense adverts are in Hebrew based upon the content of the page I am on. The algorithm finds key words (more on those later) and feeds out the adverts.

So our first lesson on Search Engines and ranking and all that good stuff is about Content. Remember the rule.

"Content is King, but Original Content is the King of Kings."

How to Use Press Releases to Promote Your Site, Gain Valuable Back Links and Rank Higher in The Search Engines

If you are into search engine optimization (SEO), there is a great way to increase your presence on the web and rank higher in the page rankings- its called press releases. Just like newspapers and fortune 500 companies release press releases, so can you.

A press release is a document that is released to news organization and information services. If you have breaking news such as a great new product, a new service being offered or your company is now in a new market, then a press release can help spread awareness whether on the internet or off.

There are professional services that will create a press release for you as well as distribute the press release to specific news organizations and information services. While some of these services do charge a fee, it is usually inexpensive to get the word out on your web site or product.

By using press releases cleverly, you can rank higher in the page rankings by receiving one way links once your press release is posted on highly regarded web sites. Google and other search engines may see your site as being part of a trusted network of information. So if you want to increase awareness of your web site or product then look into press releases.

Once, you master the process, you'll be happy for the results but after a while, you'll probably have to face a problem : "Press release are effective but it's very time consuming to log and post manually to all these websites".

Hopefully, 2 smart guys Jeff Alderson and Rod Beckwith have released a powerful software that helps you automate the process and post you press release to hundreds of quality websites. I highly recommand it to you. It's name is Press Equalizer. you can take a look at all its benefits by visiting this link : http://tinyurl.com/zqrwh .