Website Design Elixirs SEO Blog

Yahoo SERP BING Driven

admin — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:28:30 -0500

I noticed that Yahoo is powered by Bing today. Maybe its been like this for a while and I just missed it. I expect noticeable differences in my log files when this becomes permanent buy not sure about the long term benefit to webmasters with the exception of new sites.

Getting ranked on Bing for new sites is easy and all but impossible with Yahoo typically. Just get decent backlinks with anchor text relative to the content found in the page to rank with Bing. You don't need billions of them either except for the most competitive niches.

Sad to see Yahoo go. But they have really been gone a long time anyway.

Got A Favorite Shared Host?

admin — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:13:28 -0500

I've used Hostgator for the last few years and its time to move on. They just have too many problems with the servers I have accounts with. High CPU load, slow page load, backend scripts crawling. I feel like the guy in this picture.

So what's your favorite shared hosting provider?

Vacation was great. Did a lot of traveling. Not much trouble for the entire trip.
I read that the BP leak will make gas prices skyrocket. Makes me want to go green but I don't like walking and do like AC. Maybe a smaller car is in the cards.

Life Goes On

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:54:18 -0500

Sigh, life goes on. This has been building up for a long, long time.

Inactivity and age, combined with my most recent visit to the doctor, has finally struck the crowning blow. I have to go on a diet. low sodium diet. Nothing tastes good without salt, or some kind of seasoning.

Salt is bad for you on a number of levels but by the time the doctor was finished with me I was afraid of salt, sugar, and anything else that might add something to the bland taste of un-seasoned food.

Oh, I'll get used to it. Maybe I will like it before its all said and done. More excercise, better diet, lose some weight, find some resolve I had in abundance years ago...

Google Announces Chrome OS For Netbooks

admin — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:11:48 -0500

Yesterday Google announced plans for a Chrome OS designed primarily for netbooks, a low cost less powerful notebook for the budget conscious shopper.

The OS is based on a Linux kernel runnning on both x86 and ARM chips and hence will be open source.

Plans include a fast boot, get online quickly design with the web being the platform. The cloud computing technology means applications will be written using web technologies and all existing web based applications will work. The idea is to build a computer that doesn't slow down as they age the way Windows based computers do.

Do You Bing?

admin — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:41:23 -0500

I like the new interface and have always liked the heavy weight their algorithm carries for navigational searches. If you are looking for a company or domain it will be at the top of the Bing SERP's.

I just think the easter eggs on the home page are a waste of time. People use search engines to find information, book travel, buy stuff. I think very few folks will stop and mouse over the little boxes to get facts about the picture on the home page.

The little synopsis of the page and its links on the right of the snippet does seem to do a good job of identifying the page content too. This can lead to a reduction in bounce by random confused surfers but on the downside can prevent a click if the synopsis isn't targeted.

I wish Google analytics, AWStats, and the rest would get Bing integrated as a search engine soon so the keyphrases will be recorded again. Hopefully web hosts will quickly incorporate the changes throughout the web with no delay.

So, do you Bing?

MSN LIVE Webmaster Central Now Including More Backlinks

admin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:30:56 -0500

MSN / Live certainly isn't dominating search but it still provides value to webmasters, especially in certain niches.

Prior to August 13, 2008 their webmaster tools only showed the top 5 backlinks for your site. Now the Webmaster Center has included up to 1000 of your backlinks, including their method of ranking these links called Page Score.

Page Score is displayed using 1-5 asterisks with 5 being the top quality score. The links can be downloaded in comma delimited format and includes the page title, url, page score, region, and language. Please add anchor text!

Your domain backlinks can be excluded from the results by selecting the filter option, entering your domain name, and changing the list box to exclude.

The same information is also available for your domain's outbound links. More information is available at Live Search Webmaster Blog.

SEO Web Design

admin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:23:40 -0500

Chapter 4 of the Website Building Series.

SEO web design is the process of creating a website that will provide a positive influence on organic rankings for targeted keywords. The website is still created with the visitor and conversions in mind. This means that we are creating something that will be useful, linkable, and still be a contributing factor in our SEM process.

If you need some help understanding the basics of web design take a look at our HTML tutorial.

Website Building - Create A Good Foundation

admin — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:37:24 -0500

This is the third article in our website building series designed to showcase ethical, safe, seo web design methods.
The first article discussed how to qualify your niche and the second discussed seo planning.

Before we build our website we should discuss some important factors that all websites built with professional website design methods should include.

Quality Hosting

Website Building - Develop your SEO Plan

admin — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:56:12 -0500

By now you have established your niche, keywords, and have a good idea of the competition and keywords you plan to use to build traffic. If not, then go back to the website building article defining how to qualify your niche.

Prior to getting knee deep into website design we need to think about domain names, developing our site structure, and navigation, along with a few other preliminary decisions before initiating the site creation phase. Let's talk about them now.

Branding & Domain Names

Website Building Free SEO Tips | Qualify Your Niche

admin — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:40:59 -0500

To develop a successful website online it must at least meet this minimum criteria:

• There must be demand for the product / service / information.
• The level of competitiveness must be understood and accepted as reasonable and attainable
• You need to be able to monetize the site after successfully obtaining traffic.

The elite marketing types of the world can create a market. The rest of us need to identify and take advantage of one that already exists.

Identifying Demand

There are many products available for sourcing keywords and obtaining demand estimates for those keywords. Notice the word estimates. Always use multiple sources of information to get a feel for keyword demand.

Fitness, Diet, Health, & Beauty

admin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 10:46:27 -0500

A recent survey by Burst Media found that 66% of those surveyed use the Internet for "wellness" information. Wellness encompasses fitness, diet, health, and beauty.

In line with other purchasing decisions, 71% of women research wellness compared to 60% of men, but usage by men over 45 years old closely rivals women.

Baby boomers will continue to use the Internet in substantial numbers and many find the website design employed by sites as a critical factor in measuring useful and usable sites from those that are quickly abandoned.

Viewzi - Are You Ready For Visual Search?

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:14:03 -0500

Viewzi is striving to create a visual interface providing interesting search results. Their home page is nothing terribly new but when a search request is made the options provided for results are, well, visual.

I entered web design as my search and was confronted with small flash views providing the user options to choose the method of displaying results.

The shopping view provides results from Amazon, Ebay, Target, and Walmart. The video from Youtube, BlinkX, and Veoh. Photos from Flickr and Smugmug. You get the idea. There are 14 views in all provided on a horizontal slider creating a less cluttered view that should work pretty well at all resolutions.

Is Browser Compatibility Important to You

admin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:33:46 -0500

Fewer and fewer pages out there have silly messages like :

Best viewed using Internet Explorer at 1024x768 resolution

Certainly there are good reasons for this but I find it interesting when discussing compatibility issues with website design clients how many of them are unaware of usability issues poor design methodologies can create.

Simple information found in log files with analytics programs define the criteria for web page creation that will be useful and usable for visitors. Each niche has different result sets and I found it enlightening to identify the differences in two websites, one in the technology arena, the other in building materials.

Measuring Link Value

admin — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:06:51 -0500

Is a link simply a link?

It isn't if you know how to get ranked for competitive keywords. Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live search are all link centric but each has its own algorithm that treats the dozens of factors in ranking somewhat differently. This is why it can be difficult to rank high in all the search engines for your keywords at the same time.

The best way to develop a good linking campaign is to know what is important now, and what is likely to be important in the future. These are the factors we use to get our clients ranked in the search engines.

Would You Do This? Google Notebook Backlink Development

admin — Tue, 06 May 2008 00:17:04 -0500

Google Notebook is a web research tool that allows users to clip text, search results, and images from web pages and place them in notebooks for later use.

Notebook entries can be defined as public or private. So, here's the rub.

I was perusing the various search engines looking at SERP's for various keywords and noticed that on page 3 on Live search that the 30th position for Internet marketing was a public Google notebook entry.