Caffeine Scheduled to go Live after the Holiday's

 Google’s Caffeine algorithm update is scheduled to go live after the Holiday’s. Caffeine is a new technology that improves their indexing infrastructure. This is a major update for Google, and they haven’t had a major update to our knowledge in a while. Caffeine will be rolled out through the different data centers after the first of the year.

 Currently one data center is showing results from Caffeine about 50 % of the time. The IP address for this data center is: http://209.85.225.103/.

 As is always the case following Google’s webmaster guidelines will help Google find, index, and rank your site. Google Webmaster Guidelines

Must Have SEO Practices in 2010

 In the coming year many practices are the same and the rules haven’t changed. You need to adhere to the fundamentals of good web site architecture and design. SEO should not be an afterthought of designing a website; it should be part of the overall design process. So SEO should be thought about upon conception.

 Once your website is developed and goes live, SEO doesn’t end but rather is an ongoing process. The fine tweaking of your website in the long run will bring more users to your website. SEO will continue on during the entire life of your website. Just as your business needs to be nurtured on an ongoing basis so does SEO.

 To be successful in your SEO practices in the New Year you want your site to have the following:

Good document structure
Valuable and rich content
Have a strong link building strategy

 Cheers to your success in the upcoming New Year and happy web building!

Google and Duplicate Content

 Google received their patent this month in regards to duplicate content. Their crawler now checks with their duplicate content server to see if there is a duplicate content issue.

 Google defines duplicate content as the following:

"Duplicate documents are documents that have substantially identical content, and in some embodiments wholly identical content, but different document addresses."

 Google’s patent has 3 parts to it which are:

 Two pages or redirect pages are considered duplicate if they have the same content but use different url’s.

 A regular page and temporary redirect page have duplicate content if the target URL of the temporary redirect page or the content of the regular web page is the same as that of the temporary redirect page.

 Two pages are duplicate content if they have the same target url, and have different source url’s.

What all of this means to your website is that as always you should have your own unique content.  If your website must share content then you want io ensure that you site has better in bound links than the other website. This makes you the better authority of that content.

Keyword Stuffing

Those just starting to learn SEO (and possibly even some more experienced users) may become overaggressive with keyword use and risk being labeled a 'keyword stuffer'. Many SEO tips and SEO techniques center around keyword placement, but using the keywords too often and when not relevant is referred to as keyword stuffing. A rule of thumb is often said to be if a keyword or keywords are between to 15 and 20% of the content. That's a lot of keyword usage and does not go unnoticed. Many search engines will ban your site for such an offense.

The good news to those seeking SEO help is that instances of keyword stuff are typically pretty obvious (15 - 20% is hard not to notice) so it is rare that the accusation of keyword stuffing is unwarranted.

Could this be the End to SEO?

This week Google officially launched real-time search, and Yahoo announced today their launch of real-time search. Most of the real-time search is related to things like the "latest news", "Twitter", “MySpace” and "Facebook". While there will be competitive terms that real-time search may draw traffic away from. SEO's will still have good representation in the SERP's for their sites.

I don't believe that the entire index is ever going to be able to be involved in "live" searches, so SEO's will always have a place in helping websites rank well for their industry words and phrases. The real-time results do appear at the very top of a results page, which is the most coveted spot for every online marketer. Like anything else that has changed in the past users will have to educate themselves and understand what is what.

It is also true that when users search for consumer brands there is a chance that the respective brand may show up in the live stream results. But again it isn't the only thing on the page, and SEO still has its rightful place.

It is also true that the uninformed may click on the real-time results and may never see the natural search results so it will be our job as SEO’s to educate the user whenever we get a chance.

With proper tracking in place in a few months we will have some figures to look at and we will be able to see what percentage real-time search takes from the SERP’s.

While many are running around claiming that SEO is dead, I don’t believe that to be true.

How to Optimize your Website for Bing

The main reason that you want to consider optimizing your web pages for Bing are because their user demographics differ from Google. Bing users are not as tech savvy as Google users. Bings users tend to be use the web less and enjoy shopping online. So if you run or develop ecommerce sites Bing should be important to you.

Google and Bing do look for a lot of the same things such as:

Good on page seo using your h tags, unique page titles, description meta tags, alt image tags, and topic based web pages without spelling and gramatical errors.

Like Google inbound links are also important to Bing. Bing looks for topic based pages of simalar topics to interlink.

Domain age appears to be a factor more now then it was when Bing first came out.

Since BIng is definetly a work that is still in progress I continue to watch their index evolve, and it does seem to be getting better as time goes on.

Bing offers their Webmaster Central Tools

Google vs. Bing, Seriously, Common Now Tell Me You're Kidding

Alright, first and foremost I am not a Microsoft hater, I enjoy many of their products and own stock in the company. I am happy to see the strides that they have made with Bing from a usability standpoint, I think that astatically their interface is nice and user friendly. After that I don't see much change from anything that Microsoft has had search engine wise in the past.

I have gone back and looked at web logs for about 20 websites. One out of the 20 performed better using Bing then it had with previous Microsoft search products. The rest of the sites were either the same or worse, some of them having lost ground from previous Microsoft Search Engines.

As I mentioned above Microsoft is going to get some “Happy Users” strictly due to the graphic design of the website. I can see where many end users who are not that tech savvy using it because they like the way it looks. Google’s SERPS far exceed what is currently showing up on Bing. I find the relevancy on Google far better. I do believe that Bing is an improvement, but they still have a long way to go.

Lastly Bings market share right now is just under 10%, and they are projected to improve and give Google a run as time goes on. One thing is for certain though, they still have much work ahead.

Conversions, Conversions, Conversions!

 If you have taken the time to optimize your website with your industry buzz phrases and you don’t notice any difference in your business then maybe you’ve chosen the wrong buzz phrases. All of that SEO work doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t help your business convert.

You have to make sure that you have a good web site analytical tool installed so you can track where your customers come from. If you had a hundred visitors to your web page widget and you sold 1 widget then your conversion rate is 1%. So now that you know what your conversion rate is now you can move forward to the next step and that is to increase you conversions.

So how do you get more visitors to your site and how do you get more conversions?

Make sure the widget page is well optimized for that particular widget and make sure that it is the landing page when searched.

If you have a high bounce rate then you have to break it down and figure out way, because that’s not good seo. Make sure you have a strong call to action and good document structure so it is easy to navigate and figure out.

In the end your log files will tell you a lot, take the time to understand them and to make the proper adjustments.