Recently Google Sitemaps has been renamed by Google to “Google Webmaster Tools“. Since its debut, the system has expanded to offer a lot more than just XML Sitemap submission and includes crawl, indexing, and query, page analysis, and more.

The name change was put into place to better reflect the scope of products and tools available to webmasters.

You can read more at sitemaps.blogspot.com

This is a short posting but it has the potential to have a wonderous impact on your website.

Back in June Google implemented a Robots.txt validator that allows you to check for errors. The robots.txt file can easily ruin your chances for ranking if it is not carefully created and if you did make a mistake then a simple fix here might turn your life around! Read more…

Have you heard of Google?

Google shareholders must dance up a storm when they realize how ridiculous it has become to ask a question like this. Google has become an unavoidable fact of life for anyone with the intention of having their website found online. It is the ‘big daddy’ of search engines with very nearly 50% of the search market in its pocket (49.1% this May to be exact – Nielsen/Netratings). For this reason alone I get pumped up when I am given new opportunities to peek into Google’s treasure trove of stats. Today I would like to share with you a relatively new offering from Google’s lab; Google Trends.

Now, to many SEO’s there is nothing new here because we are all fanatical about keeping up on Google’s offerings; in our fast-paced world this was released decades ago in SEO time (kind of like dog years). But to clients, this may very well be an interesting new tool in their marketing arsenal and I bet that many of your competitors haven’t grasped the potential that this tool has for increasing your bottom line. So take heed and you just might find that piece of marketing information you have always wanted. Read more…

StepForth’s methods of providing search engine optimization services for Google rankings have evolved significantly over the past year. Since the release of Google’s March 30, 2005 patent application, “Information retrieval based on historical data“, our SEO and research departments have made site usability and understanding user behaviours a priority.

After reading, analysing and writing about information found in the patent application, we correctly predicted user behaviours were becoming critical factors in Google’s estimation of the relevancy or importance of documents in its index. Read more…

Have you ever wanted to know what other sites share an IP number with your client? A search conducted using this format at MSN: ip: ###.###.###.###, will reveal all the sites in the MSN index hosted at that IP. Read more…

Known as the web’s Usability Czar, Jakob Nielsen is one of the Internet’s most respected consultants, authors and commentators. Dr. Nielsen’s fame stems from his uncanny ability to note basic things most observers miss or gloss over. Although many of his observations on website usability amount to basic common sense, his message is often ignored by small to medium sized business websites and by newer webmasters and search engine marketers. Read more…

Over the past two years, both the business and practice of search engine marketing have become much more complex. The same is true of the websites search engine marketers work with. The evolving design techniques and technologies that have made the website of today far more versatile than those of previous years, have also made them harder to work with for third party service vendors such as SEOs. Read more…

Is MSN better than Google? How does Ask Jeeves stack up against Yahoo? Which of the Big4 search firms produces the most relevant results? Those questions are difficult to answer as what is relevant to one searcher might not be particularly relevant to another. Search engines are the tools we use to thread the eye of the needles found in the universal haystack we know as the Net. Read more…

A couple of weeks ago, Leslie Rohde from WindRose Software was minding his own business when a user of their signature tool, Optilink, emailed him to ask about the 404-page generated when querying Google. Read more…

Google has purchased San Diego based web analytics firm Urchin for an undisclosed amount of cash and/or stock. Urchin is a web site analysis tool that allows users to study the habits of site visitors in order to get a better view of what they are doing when they visit a particular site. Understanding the experiences of site visitors allows webmasters to track the performance of their websites and better optimize content to meet the wants and needs of those visitors. Currently, Urchin tools are available as hosted services (run from Urchin.com), software packages (run from user’s computer), or as the default site-stat service offered by many larger ISPs. Read more…