Archive for the ‘Search Engine Marketing (SEM)’ Category

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Image Search is the feature

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

As you might know I run a shop in wich I am selling my collection of Madonna merchandise and rare items. I am implementing several techniques to increase results from search engines. What surprises me is that Google Image Search brings a lot of traffic to my site, even more than Google ‘regular’ search.

In the overview below you see a list of visits from sites that link to Madonna shop. You’ll see that only search engines and Wikipedia are part of the top 10. This is because my Link Partner network still has to be expanded and is less easy than getting traffic from search engines.

http://images.google.com/   290 13,73%

Since I enabled the option Enhanced Image Search in  Google Webmaster Tools, traffic from Google Image Search has increased and now go beyond the amount of traffic from regular Google results. This means that there is a lot of search traffic waiting for you.

So if you sell products, make sure the name of your product images are constructed correctly and that you assigned an alt-tag with descriptive information.

Posted in Google, Google SiteMaps | No Comments »

Google Webmaster Tools shows links (to links)

Friday, February 16th, 2007

When inserting the results of our new Google SiteMaps MCMS add-on to my Google Webmaster Tools account, I noticed a very handy new feature. Google now shows the internal links of your website and the external links pointing to your site.

Yesterday we implemented a new functionality for our MCMS 2002 framework; a Google SiteMaps extension which generates a Google SiteMap containing the channel structure of the website. I then ofcourse added the SiteMap to Google Webmaster Tools and I noticed this new piece of information.

As you can see in the screenshot, our site contains a page containing the vacancy “Web Analist”. The URL is:

http://www.tamtam.nl/www/NL/Tam_Tam/Vacatures/Web_Analist.htm

In this screenshot you see that several external sites link to our vacancy.

 

Posted in Google SiteMaps | No Comments »

One Sitemap protocol for Google/Yahoo/Microsoft

Friday, November 17th, 2006

There is some news from Google Sitemaps. I think sites that utilize Google Sitemaps will benefit over sites that are not. Especially in the long run as using XML Sitemaps will decrease time needed to crawl your site. Start using them now!

We’re thrilled to tell you that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in supporting the Sitemap protocol.As part of this development, we’re moving the protocol to a new namespace, www.sitemaps.org, and raising the version number to 0.9. The sponsoring companies will continue to collaborate on the protocol and publish enhancements on the jointly-maintained site sitemaps.org.If you’ve already submitted a Sitemap to Google using the previous namespace and version number, we’ll continue to accept it. If you haven’t submitted a Sitemap before, check out the documentation on

www.sitemaps.org for information on creating one. You can submit your Sitemap file to Google using Google webmaster tools. See the documentation that Yahoo! and Microsoft provide for information about submitting to them.If any website owners, tool writers, or webserver developers haven’t gotten around to implementing Sitemaps yet, thinking this was just a crazy Google experiment, we hope this joint announcement shows that the industry is heading in this direction. The more Sitemaps eventually cover the entire web, the more we can revolutionize the way web crawlers interact with websites. In our view, the experiment is still underway.

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Google SiteMaps now has Enhanced Image Search

Wednesday, October 25th, 2006

Google SiteMaps now features Enhanced Image Search, a new feature which makes enhanched searching for images possible. This feature uses Google Image Labeler to associate the images included in your site with labels that will improve indexing and search quality of those images.

Google Image Labeler is an volunteer network for people who want to help label images found on the internet. You can sign up as guest at the Google Image Labeler website.

Another reason to start indexing your site with Google SiteMaps. I’m currently implementing this service for several customers now and their pages are being accessed more frequently due to Google SiteMaps.

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Generate Google Sitemaps XML for MCMS

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

Are you trying to create a Google Sitemaps XML file from your Microsoft Content Management Server 2002/SP1?

Then be sure to try out the sample published by Steven Mostinckx. If you don’t want to compile the code yourself, download the compiled version here: GoogleSitemaps.exe (16 KB)

It’s really easy to run this application; start a command prompt and paste:

GoogleSitemaps.exe “/channels/mysite” “c:/temp/GoogleSitemaps.xml” http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.yoursite.com/ /empty/

(the parameters are: 
-startpath
-path+name xml result
-xmlns
-domain
-skipchannels)

You should have installed MCMS on your machine ofcourse.

Thanks to my colleague Jasper for the hint!



www.omtrends.com

Posted in Google, Google SiteMaps | No Comments »

Evolution of Yahoo! and Google

Monday, March 6th, 2006

My colleague Paul sent me this picture showing the evolution of Google compared to Yahoo!

It’s funny to see that both companies have completely different ideas as what works best for their visitors; Google focusses primarily on search while Yahoo! focusses on so many things you could easily get lost.



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Google wins over MSN Search in 2005

Saturday, February 11th, 2006

A recent report by Nielsen/Netratings reports that Google wins popularity in favor of it’s two largest competitors Yahoo! and MSN Search.

“The total number of searches in the U.S. conducted across approximately 60 search engines grew 55 percent year-over-year to nearly 5.1 billion searches in December 2005. There were 3.3 billion searches conducted via search engines in December 2004.

Google wins most of the increase in search engine use, they see their share of search activity rise to 48,8%. Most noticable is the drop of MSN Search to 10,9%.

Read the report about online searches here.

 



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Yahoo! Search Marketing

Friday, February 3rd, 2006

Overture is to be renamed to Yahoo! Search Marketing February 27th as you can read in the Dutch email I just received;

Op 27 februari 2006, zullen Overture en moederbedrijf Yahoo! hun zoekmachine marketing produkten gaan combineren onder een nieuwe naam: Yahoo! Search Marketing. Vanaf deze dag zal Overture Services S.A.R.L in Europa haar werkzaamheden gaan uitvoeren onder de naam Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Met deze verandering heeft u zeer eenvoudig en via één centraal punt toegang tot de meest uitvoerige reeks van online marketing producten en diensten die deze industrie kent. En tenslotte zal Yahoo! Search Marketing u een meer geintregeerd beheer van uw volledige online marketing campagne bezorgen.

They are still vague about possible improvements of the interface that defenitely should be there any day soon. Let’s keep an eye on them !



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Precision Internet Marketing

Monday, January 30th, 2006

MoreVisibility published their “2006 – Precision Marketing : Opportunities in Search” whitepaper. It doesn’t include a lot of new information, though I didn’t know about the demographic targetting Microsoft AdCenter will have. Read the whitepaper to get all the info:

Precision_Internet_Marketing.pdf (63.9 KB)

Posted in Microsoft AdCenter, Online Marketing | No Comments »

JavaScript not widely accepted by search engine spiders

Monday, January 16th, 2006

Today I coincidentally opened two of my WebTrends profiles that are analyzing the same site; one of them is based on Logfiles, the other is based on the SmartSource Data Collector script from WebTrends. The script is JavaScript that reads some components from the page (META tag, TITLE etc.) and generates an IMG tag containing this information. There was no NOSCRIPT tag available for this profile for compatibility with non-JavaScript compatible users.>

If you look at the two screenshots there is one conclusion; Only few spiders can read JavaScript. Be sure the vital parts of your site do not depend on JavaScript.
 



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