It seems that search engine are digging through Twitter more and more
. In the past few days a came across a few episodes which made me think about how much search engine are considering Twitter content as valuable enough to be included into their own search results.
Let’s take a look at Bing first. Try looking for Al Gore this query on Bing: the very first result will be it’s Twitter page with is real time twits. This entry comes also before his personal website. This has been also confirmed by a public statement from Bing published on its community page.
Something interesting happens with Google as well. A few days ago I posted a link to one of my websites I found and I wanted to share with my Twitter followers. Analytics record show the following as the very first visit on the website right after the link was published on twitter:
216.200.55.83 invx.com [01/Jul/2009:02:49:01 +0200] “GET /a HTTP/1.1″ 404 136 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” “-”
Clearly the page was just being crawled by Google. The link has not apperead anywhere else and it is not a fronpage or entry page for search engines on the website.
This it’s just another proof on how important Twitter is becoming in terms on search value. It’s not going to take long before Google itself will either buy or create its own real time search tool.
It’s basically the Bing version of Google Webmaster tools. According to Microsoft, Bing Webmaster Toolbox development will aim toboost user engagement and traffic to websites and web-based application. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums.
Compared to competitors like Google and Yahoo, I guess the community its the real bonus of the toolbox. The collaborative and collective help of users is way more valuable than any webmaster toolbox, especially when it comes to SEO and content optimizacion, considering how recently Bing has been released.
We all know SEO is not science: most of SEO practices come from direct experience or reliable source but there’s som much uncertainity that makes everything blend into doubts.
That’s the reason why advices coming straight from Matt Cutts or the Google webmaster blog should be taken definetely seriously. We’ve already seen Matt getting into certain topics put into the spotlight of the SEO community and giving useful (altough sometimes ambigous) insight.
This time he realeased a bunch of slides he presented to the 2009 San Francisco Wordcamp
Following is a resume of the main points he discussed:
Crawlers and PageRank algorithm
- Google spiders go crowling pages in a pagerank order: highest pagerank pages get crawled before pages with a lower pagerank
- Being relevant and reputable is the actual criteria that works behind the Page Rank
Keywords and content optimization
- When it comes to keywords, put yourself into the user shoes: think about what he would type in his search string
- Do not think about stuffing your pages with keywords: write naturally.
- ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)
WordPress
- Set your permalink to domain.com/post-title (setting -> reading -> custom permalink structure /%postname%/)
- Modify your titles and file names (urls) acconrding to the content
This is the powerpoint format. Slides are also available from Google Docs.
Ever wondered of managing redirect without Google getting to know about it?
We can actually play around with CSS in order to redirect pages and traffic. Since this trick will involve only CSS, we can be pretty sure of going unnoticed by search engines still achieving what we want.
This trick still uses Javascript in some sort of way. But the good thing about it is that CSS code does not get analyzed by Google.
Now, just think about all the possible SEO exploits this trick can have…!
We just need these three files:
redirect.htc
<attach event="ondocumentready" handler="redirect" />
<script language="JScript">
function redirect() {
window.document.location.href = 'http://www.xxxxxxxxx.com';
}
</script>
Then redirect.xml
<?xml version = "1.0"?>
<bindings xmlns = "http://www.mozilla.org/xbl" xmlns:html = "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<binding id = "redirect" applyauthorstyles = "false">
<implementation>
<constructor>
//
var elem = this; // maintain a reference to the bound element
window.addEventListener('load',
function()
{
location.href='http://www.xxxxxxxxxx.com';
},false);
//
</constructor>
</implementation>
</binding>
</bindings>
index.html code
<style>
body {
behavior:url("./redirect.htc");
-moz-binding: url('./redirect.xml#redirect');
}
</style>
According to a new report from Hitwise about search trends, the average number keywords used in search queries is increasing. Queries with four words and more are showing an increase in number of searches. It’s the final proof to the long tail theory . People is realizing how crowded the web is and how hard is to find exactly what they’re looking for. Hence a more specific search query which supposedly will turn up better results.
It’s good news for advertising as well: long tail queries mean a higher rate of conversion when it comes to turn a lead into a customer.
The weirdest thing though is the steep increase in search queries with eight or more words. Is people actually treating search engines like some weird kind of slave robots, submitting articulated and verbalizaed queries? Are those words only keywords or proper sentencies? Anyway, it’s just good news for SEO. Being more specific on content can only help and this is the final demonstration.