Google for dummies

If at the next cocktail party you attend someone walks up to you and asks for the seven millionth time how you can work with Google without working for Google, these are the videos you have to show them (and shut them up forever):

As a company, Google focuses on three key areas: Search, Ads and Apps. Search is our core technology; ads are our central business proposition; and apps are the umbrella over our web-based software that you can access anywhere, any time. While each of these has a lot of technology under the hood, the basic tenets for Search, Ads and Apps are very simple. We’ve created some short videos explaining the principles behind our core services.

How Google Search works by Matt Cutts:

How Google Search Ads work by Nundu Janakiram:

How Google Apps work by Vivian Leung:

via How Google Works

How to make your standard WordPress titles more attractive?

Most WordPress themes have the same, SEO-unfriendly, standard titles. Although the times are changing little by little, a lot of blogs still use those unattractive titles. They don’t look good in the SERP‘s and when you add a post to a social bookmarking site, chances are real those strange looking characters (« and ») will be transformed into something unreadable. Time to make a change…

Title tag

  • Login to your WordPress backend and go to Design > Theme Editor.

Continue reading How to make your standard WordPress titles more attractive?

How to redirect your old site to a new domain and keep your rankings

Today I had to help someone redirect an old site to a new site with new domain name. It is possible to keep the search engine history and rankings of the old pages and transfer them to the new site.

How to redirect your old site to your new site

We’ll use www.oldsite.com as the one that needs to be closed and www.newsite.com as the new website (or the existing one that needs to be merged with the old one).

OK, here we go:

Continue reading How to redirect your old site to a new domain and keep your rankings

Google experimenting with new personalized search result pages

In the endless battle to improve and personalize search results, Google often launches new features in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP’s). If the users like them, the new features might become visible to everyone, if not, they die a silent death.

Personalized search results on Google

With the latest feature Google aims at improving the results itself:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

And this is what it looks like:

Continue reading Google experimenting with new personalized search result pages

Validating your website HTML code, CSS and RSS-feed

Most people claim you get higher rankings if your HTML code, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and RSS-feed are W3C compliant. I don’t always agree; it’s perfectly possible to rank a site without having every small detail just the way the World Wide Web Consortium specifies.

W3C HTML CSS RSS validation

Of course there are limitations. If you make too much mistakes in your HTML, CSS or feed, your rankings will be affected, but some small mistakes will be neglected (but you should always at least try to produce code as clean as possible). This is not the case for your RSS-feed. If it doesn’t comply, it might not be useable in every feedreader and you might lose a lot of visitors. So there are times you might want to check the validation for your (or someone else’s) website.

Checking the validation of your HTML, CSS and feed with the W3C validation services is not that hard, but with the shortcuts I am offering you, it’s really easy.

Continue reading Validating your website HTML code, CSS and RSS-feed

Is Yahoo! going for universal search?

It’s only a few months since Google decided to provide its search engine result pages with additional media. The so called “universal search” was born. The Google SERP’s no longer only offer webpages, but also news, images, videos, maps, stock information,… Sure it will make our SEO work more difficult, but also more challenging.

Yahoo! universal search: delicious integration

And now Yahoo! seems to be going the same way. Is Yahoo! gradually adding extra information to its result pages? Sure looks like it! Techcrunch noticed Yahoo! SERP’s today that mentioned the number of times a web page was added to del.icio.us.

Continue reading Is Yahoo! going for universal search?

Checklist for an SEO friendly Content Management System

When you’re looking for a Content Management System or CMS, don’t just accept the first proposal made by your familiar web designer or developer. There are tons of great and easy to use content management systems out there, but most of them aren’t search engine friendly. And if there is one thing you don’t want to be behind on your competitors, it is your online visibility and findability. By presenting your web designer or developer a checklist of requirements the CMS should meet, you can avoid a lot of problems regarding rankings in the search engines up front. Adjusting the CMS later on can cost you a lot of time and money.

Checklist for an Search engine friendly Content Management System

I’m going to present to you a list of requirements a search engine friendly CMS should meet. This list is not exhaustive and your additions and comments are more than welcome. Whether the content management system runs on PHP or .NET, whether it needs Apache or IIS, it doesn’t mind, these are some main criteria for a CMS you won’t regret : Continue reading Checklist for an SEO friendly Content Management System

11 reasons why I like Wikia, the new kid on the search engine block

 

 

I realize most comments about the newest Search Engine Wikia aren’t exactly great, but to be honest: I like it… I really do !!!

Wikia Search

But first, what is this Wikia everybody is talking about ? Wikia is the new, long awaited Search Engine launched by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. His name is often followed by the epithet “Google’s worst nightmare“, although I don’t really see why ;-)

A while ago, he promised the internet (Wikipedia) community he would build a search engine that could compete with Google. And not just that, everyone would be able to contribute to the search results by adding his own content or by scoring the ranking sites. A Search Engine 2.0 as you will. And yesterday, the first Wikia alpha version was launched.

Before I tell you what I really like about it, I think I should start with why I’m disappointed in Wikia: Continue reading 11 reasons why I like Wikia, the new kid on the search engine block