Another update for search engine market share for Jan 2009.
| Search Engine | % search share |
|---|---|
| 63.0 | |
| Yahoo | 21.0 |
| MSN | 8.5 |
| AOL | 3.9 |
| Ask | 3.7 |
Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
Search Engine Market Share for Jan 2009
Thursday, February 26th, 2009How do People get to your Site?
Thursday, January 22nd, 2009This table has a lot of interesting perspective in it. It shows how people get to your website through referrals.
Visitor Referrals %
| Entity | Dec 2007 | Dec 2008 |
| Search engines | 46% | 45% |
| Linking sites | 21% | 22% |
| Bookmarks/direct typing | 23% | 23% |
| Paid advertising | 6% | 5% |
| Other | 4% | 5% |
Search engines still rank high as a place where people find and go to your site…so don’t cut SEO out of your budget, yet! Social media is growing but over the past year has not made a big dent in referring people to your site. Interesting, about 1 out of 4 people use bookmarks or direct URL entry to get to your site. Not surprising with the economy the way it is, paid advertising took a dip the past year.
Doug
How do People Find Local Information?
Friday, October 31st, 2008Here’s a helpful table of how people search for local information. Bottom line: Internet up, printed down.
| Search method | 2007 | 2008 |
|---|---|---|
| Printed yellow pages/white pages | 33% | 30% |
| Search engines | 30% | 31% |
| Online yellow pages | 17% | 19% |
| Local search sites | 13% | 11% |
| Newspaper/magazine | 3% | 3% |
| Social networks | 0% | 1% |
| Other print directory | 1% | 1% |
| Directory assistance | 2% | 2% |
| Mobile phone | 1% | 1% |
This study was conducted in July 2008 by TMP Directional Marketing.
Home Page Redirects: An SEO Advantage
Thursday, September 4th, 2008I recently wrote an article on how to perform home page redirects which will help in SEO. A home page redirect is where www.mydomain.com/index.html is redirected to www.mydomain.com/. This gets the search engine bots to your home page in only one way: www.mydomain.com/. Of course you should also redirect mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com.
If you should change your home page to index.php it can easily be redirected to www.mydomain.com/ without loss of link juice. Note the redirect code works for all subdirectories, too. For example, if you have www.mydomain.com/products/index.php it will be redirected to www.mydomain.com/products/.
Note this article is for web sites on Apache servers since it requires modification to the .htaccess file.
Doug
Tables and SEO
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008An often overlooked place to add great content is right in your table: the summary attribute. The purpose of this attribute is to add accessibility to the table. A synopsis of what the table represents provides braille and other readers an audio summary. A side effect of this is to provide search engines with a nice piece of information about the table. Don’t forget the summary attribute when filling in your next table.
Usage
<table summary="this table is about blah">
Doug
Not Getting Indexed by Live/MSN? Try This…
Friday, December 28th, 2007I tried everything I know of to get one of my sites (dougthecook.com) back into Live search index. Over a period of a few days it degraded to being delisted. Anyway, after a few weeks of being unlisted, a friend of mine suggested I add the RSS feed of dougthecook to my “My MSN” account. A few days later, there is dougthecook.com – back in the index.
Doug
What Good are Google Sitemaps?
Thursday, March 15th, 2007Don’t get confused: a regular sitemap (links on a webpage which summarize your website) is not a Google sitemap.
A Google Sitemap file will inform Google of the URLs on your site, including the dates when you last changed them. If and when Google is ready to crawl your site, it will take this information into account and use it to optimize it’s visit. If it already knows your site a bit and you signal that you have changed one of those pages (added a new link to it or just fixed a misspelling), then it will go have a look as soon as your site is up again.
Microsoft and Yahoo have joined Google to adopt the sitemap as a standard. sitemaps.org has an FAQ on sitemaps along with the XML schema and a few other tidbits.
Publishing a sitemap will not get your site crawled more often; it will just optimize the search bot visit when it does crawl your site. Likewise, it will *not* get more of your site crawled, but it might concentrate on the more important parts. When it does crawl your pages, it will process them regularly, meaning that any content you have on it will usually get used for web search.
How to Create a Sitemap
Google Webmaster Tools offers a python script that generates a sitemap.
Another popular tool is the GSiteCrawler: it will crawl your site, take a look at all of your pages (and yes, it will make counters count, if your gallery program counts all visits) and use that information to make a Google Sitemap file. In a sense, you are looking at your site with the GSiteCrawler and taking that information so that Google does not have to do as much work (and can concentrate on the important parts).
One advantage of running a sitemap crawler is that if it gets stuck on your site, so will Google and other search indexers.
There are plug-ins for blogs, such as WordPress, that will generate a new sitemap every time a blog is created or modified and notify Google of the change.
Google sitemaps are there to help the search bot; not improve your website’s search result placement.
Doug
Link Popularity for Blogging
Sunday, December 10th, 2006Most online people have their own web sites. For business owners web site is almost mandatory. One of the best ways to improve link popularity and traffic of a website is by blogging. Up to date information can be posted quickly, giving viewers an edge. A way to increase quality links to your web site is to have others write blog articles about your niche. This service is a way to quickly get many links pointing to your web site. Search engines use quality links as an important part of their algorithm for rating a web site. This is one avenue worth investigating.
Doug
Control over Using ODP Information
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006For site owners included in ODP (Open Directory Project) the information is displayed as a default on search results. Google now gives webmasters the option to add a simple meta tag to their webpages to tell the search engine not to display their ODP (Open Directory Project) information:
Insert the following anywhere between the header tags:
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP" />
This works only for the google bot, so not every search engine who uses the ODP will immediately follow suit. Here’s the code that applies to all search engines who choose to use it:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP" />
I understand about 90% of the site descriptions contained in the ODP is outdated so using the out-of-date information is detrimental to the website owner.
Doug