Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2009-12-04

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December 4th, 2009 Welcome to the latest issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. You know all about Android, Google's smartphone operating system, and the various devices that employ it. So is Google content to let other manufacturers make Android-based devices, or are they coming out with one of their own? The article we are highlighting this week from eWeek looks for the substance behind the rumors. If you are looking for more substance, you do not need to look any further than the articles on SEO Chat this week. Monday's item covered the research results of a study set up in an earlier article aimed at answering a common SEO question: how do search engine spiders treat the meta robots tag and robots(dot)txt? If you want to know how and whether your pages will be indexed (and by which search engines), you need to read this article. Tuesday's article featured a grab bag of tips to help you with your next SEO campaign. The best thing about our SEO Chat forums is our knowledgeable members, and how willing they are to share that knowledge, as you will see in this week's thread. The original poster gets a quick education on the important parts of an SEO campaign. Be sure to stop by the thread to be educated or offer your own advice. And while you are in a pedantic frame of mind, why not pay a visit to Tutorialized? You will find more than 100 SEO-related tutorials on the site, covering such topics as choosing keywords, website promotion, and more. You can read through the material, or if you see a gap in the collection you know you can fill, you can always submit your own tutorial. It is free, and it will put you in front of our worldwide audience. Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, covers the question of Flash-based websites. Google can read at least some aspects of Flash now; does that mean Flash is no longer anathema to SEO? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out. As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff

ARTICLES Google AdWords: Keywords, Ad Writing and Landing Pages Ivan`s SEO Tips Study Results: Search Engines, Meta Robots Tag and Robots.txt SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail     Rational Build Forge Express eKit Rational Build Forge Express Edition is an automation framework that packages the latest enterprise-grade technologies into a reliable, flexible and robust configuration designed and priced specifically for small to midsize businesses. The new Rational Build Forge Express eKit provides you with valuable resources - including a case study, podcast, demo, and articles - to help you increase staff productivity, compress development cycles and deliver better software, fast. Learn more. Build Forge Express demo: Enabling software delivery excellence for small and midsized businesses This demonstration gives you an overview of IBM Rational Build Forge Express Edition, a global offering that provides a framework to automate and execute software processes. Rational Build Forge provides a software assembly line that can support all of your tools, technologies, and platforms so you can achieve a repeatable, reliable, and traceable build and release process. Learn more.

Recently Updated Most Popular   What can you do with the Sun Software Library? Find cool apps, white papers, videos and more, or publish your own. CAM xml editor - brochure Overview The vision of the CAM work is for describing machine-processable information content flows. >> more details Aspose.Report for Java After the successful launch of Aspose.Report for .NET, Aspose has introduced its Java version (Aspose.Report for Java) which is... >> more details Search the Sun Software Library for cool commercial and open source applications running on Java™, Solaris™, SPARC®, Netbeans™, and more. Get apps, read/write reviews, or publish your own. Want to see more? Visit the Sun Software Library today! >> more details   What can you do with the Sun Software Library? Find apps or publish your own. Amanda Enterprise With Amanda Enterprise, systems administrators can set up a master backup server >> more details Quercus 3.1.x Quercus is Caucho Technology's 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. >> more details Lucene Java 2.4.x Written in Java and runs on cross-platforms. This release has many improvements since release 2... >> more details Ubuntu 8.x The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the latest and greatest software the open source community has to offer. >> more details Get the word out! Publish your commercial or open source applications running on Java™, Solaris™, x86, Netbeans™ and more, in the Sun Software Library. Add links to downloads, white papers, video clips and other collateral.

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It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: Jenny dishes up more News of the Weird and answers the age olf question: How do robots get hairy hands? Prank of the week and a video flashback - what more could you want? Watch the video!

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Google AdWords: Keywords, Ad Writing and Landing Pages by Ivan Strouchliak 2009-12-02 In the last article we covered the basics of Google AdWords . In this one we will touch on keyword research, writing ads, ad elements and landing pages. This is the second part of a four-part series. Targeting the Right Prospects with Keyword Research The best prospects to target on AdWords and other pay-per-click platforms are people who are one step away from the purchase. These people have already made up their minds and are ready to give out their credit card numbers. Those searchers use long, targeted, and very specific keyword phrases, in many cases with low search volume. The trick is finding those keywords and positioning your ad on the top spot for the click. Keyword Research In this section we will discuss the creation of focused keyword lists to target on AdWords. I personally like two tools for my keyword research... Read Google AdWords: Keywords, Ad Writing and Landing Pages

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Ivan`s SEO Tips by Ivan Strouchliak 2009-12-01 Here is a collection of SEO tips covering some frequently-asked questions about Google, buying and building new websites, and building links. You will almost certainly find something in this grab bag you did not know before that you can use in your next SEO campaign. Get a Second Listing If you are up on Google for a good keyword, you can get a second indented listing for that keyword by creating another page on the same topic. This will essentially double your traffic for a keyword, and bump down one of the competitors. To get a second indented listing you need to create a page with similar keyword focus. Content on both pages should be 100% different, without the slightest hint of duplicity. This also goes for <title> and <H tags>. Read Ivan`s SEO Tips

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Study Results: Search Engines, Meta Robots Tag and Robots .txt by Codex-M 2009-11-30 Welcome to the second part of a two-part series that tests search engine reactions to the meta robots tag and robots .txt. In this part, the results of the experiment and testing we set up in the first part will be presented. For details about the experiment background, setup of the test pages and user-agents, please refer to the first part. You need to have read it very carefully to easily understand this one. Data collection, as mentioned in the first part, will be done by Crawl Track , a web analytic script used to detect search engine bot visits to the test pages. The time frame of the experiment covered is October 17, 2009 through November 20, 2009, more than a month of data collection and observation. After logging in to the Crawl Track webmaster dashboard and visiting the "Crawler" section, you can see the complete list of bots that visits the website... Read Study Results: Search Engines, Meta Robots Tag and Robots.txt

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Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! Tips for SEO Friendly Websites Form follows function. Before designing a website there are quite a few important factors to consider. Read the tutorial. What Does Seo Stand For? What does seo stand for? Simply put SEO stands for search engine optimization. Read the tutorial. Submit Your Sitemap to Google Techniques you can use to submit your sitemap to Google. An imperative step to get good rank! Read the tutorial. 30 SEO Tips for Web Designers & Small Business Owners 30 SEO Tips in 30 Days to turn your website SEO ready. Read the tutorial. Submitting your URL to Search Engines How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible. Read the tutorial. How to Make Your Blog Stand Out from the Crowd Quick tips to improve your blog from every aspects! Read the tutorial.

How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.

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Remember when you first launched a web site and could not understand why you were not ranking? Sometimes a simple question yields a lot of help a peek into the mysteries of SEO, as you will find in this week's thread. Feel free to join the thread and contribute more helpful advice. vharkish Need SEO help I launched my site two months ago, bellyscarf(dot)com, and am not coming up anywhere in Google or MSN for my keywords; Yahoo I am okay on. Can anyone check and tell me why and what I should do?  My page rank is 0 / 10 in Google.  My key phrase is belly dance hip scarf.  Any help would be appreciated. PhilipSEO Vkarish, learning correct SEO is fully an option. The first thing to understand is that there are the following stages of SEO:  (1) keyword strategy optimization (find the high-volume, targeted, relevant search keywords for your market niche) (2) on-page optimization (content, design, URL, navigation, link, HTML and code optimization) (3) on-site optimization (much in the same categories, but for robust sites there are sometimes additional requirements of content delivery and performance optimization) and (4) off-site optimization (link growing, including attempts at getting listed in the top directories such as the Yahoo Business Directory and dmoz(dot)org). I would suggest you start with keyword research. There are many resources on the Web that explain how to do it. You can also use a tool like KeywordSpy to easily find out your competitors' keywords. Once you have developed your own keyword list, create a Google AdWords campaign with conversion tracking. Test your keywords on AdWords. This process defines the list of your top-converting keywords. Use this list to create pages optimized for those top keywords. Find out the principles of on-page optimizations (Keywords in URL, title, <h#>tags; emphasis, keywords in link anchor text etc.) Interlink your pages internally with keywords in the anchor text. Do not use any of the obsolete techniques (now considered black hat SEO) such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, page cloaking; do not try to deceive the search engines. These techniques no longer work and will get your site in trouble. Once the website itself is optimized for keywords, or while it is being optimized, carefully research good linking practices and develop backlinks. On the web, always check the date and only read the most current/correct SEO information, because SEO changes to a significant degree practically every year. There is a bit more to it than I have described, and you may get faster results by hiring a professional. Remember, SEO is not the only way to drive traffic to your site, and you should explore others too. If you want to monetize products or services online though, SEO is the way to go.  I hope this helps a bit, and good luck. dwhitmore Being an ordinary member of the public, I have no idea how to belly dance, where it originated from, where you can watch it (online and real-world), who is the best at it, its history, what you wear when doing it, etc. Bearing in mind I have not actually looked at your site, why not develop some excellent articles, tutorials and videos on belly dancing - and people will be so excited about having a go, they will be desperate to wear the scarf when doing so! Write some great linkbait and attract visitors that way, and hopefully it will aid in getting traffic, sales and links. Good luck! Dan Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read the full thread.

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To Flash or Not to Flash? Google has been able to index Flash for a year and a half now, but questions still crop up about this topic. And it is no wonder; even today, some SEO companies will not touch Flash because it is difficult to rank. At the other extreme are those who try to rank with a website containing no text or images, just Flash. So how should you build your site? Obviously that is going to depend on what is expected for your field. You would not expect a real estate agent, a lawyer, and an artist (of any kind) to present sites that look the same. But each might make use of Flash in one way or another. In any case, there are things you can do to make it easier for Google to not only index, but rank a website with Flash. You will want to learn how to use the NOEMBED tag and the .div CSS element. The latter can be associated with a JavaScript function called SWFObject to let you detect when browsers can display and view Flash. Spiders that can not handle flash will opt to view your primary content, which should include links, headings, text, etc. Taking it one step further, if your heart is set on an "all-Flash" approach, new_seo, one of our respected SEO Chat forum members, advises that you create an HTML version of the Flash site and offer that one to the spiders to index. "You can create distinct HTML pages for each Flash page, and install the Flash movie on each page," he notes. "If the visitor can handle Flash, they will see it. Otherwise, there will still be the HTML version, also accessible to search engine spiders for indexing. You might lose the seamless effect that comes with Flash, but you will gain visibility and, possibly, some good ranking." If you want to see what search engines see when they index your page, you will want to use the Flash Search Engine SDK tool called swf2html. It extracts the text from the Flash file and transfers it into a simple HTML document. The fact of the matter is, though, that ranking a Flash-based site is usually more difficult than ranking a text-based site. This is in part due to how Google works. The search engine tries to get users to the most relevant part of a web site in a single click. If you build your website into a single Flash file, you do not give Google anything to grab; it can not link to a specific part of that file. Examine the pros and cons carefully before building a Flash-based website. Sure, they are pretty, but they come with lots of down sides and what is the point of having a pretty website if no one can find it? You can still include Flash to enhance your site, of course, but if indexing and ranking in the search engines is important, you will want to consider providing alternate text below the Flash. Good luck! Read the relevant forum thread.

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