Online Marketing Trends

Google Webmaster Tools unleashes information about who links to pages of your site that do not exist.

With this information you now have the power to create re-directs to altered URL’s or to block sites that are spamming your website. This is yet another step Google takes to get the internet tidy and clean, giving you information you would probably never get unless you are keeping up with your 404 logs.

With this information I was able to correct some broken links that were introduced during the migration of my blog from dasBlog to WordPress and the upgrade from older versions of WordPress to the latest version.

Google Webmaster Tools 404 Not found 1

Google Webmaster Tools 404 Not found 2

 Follow me, visit Google Webmaster Tools and get these problems solved !

Recently I bought the book Search Engine Optimization : An Hour A Day. This book is written by Gradiva Couzin (who calls herself the left brain) and Jennifer Grappone (who calls herself the right brain). I assumed this book would give me new insights to my already broad knowledge of search engine optimization.

With a flight trip of 14 hours to and from Bangkok - Thailand in front that should be enough of time to spam my both brain sides with a lot of new information about SEO. Unfortunately my assumption wasn’t justified. The book seems to be written for people who are completely new to search marketing. It takes your hand and uses a lot of words to explain relatively simple things. After some pages I decided to skip everything I didn’t already know and actually I was at the end before I knew.

Unfortunately I just can not reccommend this book unless you are really new to the world of left and right brains If so, buy the book at Amazon: Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Day

You can now point spiders to your sitemap from your robots.txt.

Just add this to the robots.txt:

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

See http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html#submit_robots

Last year one of our clients came to us asking us how to get higher positions in search engines. We advised to rebuild the initially in 2002 built site from a frame to frameless site. The results are promising.

Both absolute and relative number of visits through Search Engines are still on the rise. The chart below shows you number of avarage daily visits on the site and through search.

The number of visits through Google has already tripled. Note that December is a bad search month. This is the only month in which traffic from search has declined.

Besides this, Google’s PageRank has increased from 3 to 5. This means that in general results from this site have better positions than it used to have.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!