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Studies show that around 90% of the overall Internet traffic is generated through search engines, they (search engines) also handle more than half of all the E-commerce transactions. This reveals how important and pivotal the impact of search engines is, on your online business. At the same time, this also means that you can change the way your business performs on the web, or in other words worldwide (as your business is now visible to all who accesses the Internet).

Therefore, to place their businesses in the top most rank of search engines listings, online business owners adopt the practice of search engine optimization or hire professionals to do the same for them. Search engine optimization or also SEO (in short), can simply be explained as the practice of improving your business or site’s ranking on search engines by utilizing various tools and techniques. Getting your business listed on the top rank of search engines means your business will be the first recommended option for whoever runs a search, inquiring about a product or service related to the one your site provide.

However, not all types of tweaking and methods (that you perform on your site) are permitted by search engines like Google (which is also touted as the ‘Search Engine King’) who provides guidelines for site owners and webmasters. These guidelines, also known as the search engine guidelines, if implemented in to your website, assures what is called the natural ranking of your site on the search engines. This type of optimization with the application of ethical approaches is also known as white-hat techniques. Some few white-hat SEO techniques are:

• Quality content on your site.
• Structural or semantic mark up and separate content from presentation.
• Providing proper titles and meta data for your pages.
• Keyword research.
• Quality inbound links and so on.

To ensure that your website stays on the right side of the track and violates none of the search engine guidelines, you need a webmaster or a team of professional SEOs that has an extensive knowledge of all the guidelines and are able to follow them while optimizing your website. A poor or erratic search engine optimization of your website may result in the violation of the search engine guidelines and get your website a web spam label. Web spam or spamdexing or search spam or search engine spam, is the manipulation of the relevancy or prominence of resources indexed by a search engine. This practice is considered un-ethical and unfair, and is commonly known as the black-hat SEO technique.

Since black-hat SEO technique violates the guidelines for ethical techniques in getting natural ranking on search engines, your website could be penalized or even removed from the search listings of the search engines. This can be explained in a better way by citing an example. In a recent video posted by Matt Cutts, the head of the Web spam team at Google, he reveals two main types of ranking penalties a site can receive (from Google) and also how to deal with them. The two penalties are:

• Algorithmic Penalties – They include content spam, keyword stuffing, cloaking, sneaky Javascript redirects etc. If one of these or other related discoveries are made by Google on your website, your site will be penalized. To remove the penalty, you must fix the issues on your website, then Google will detect them and would return your website in its search results again.
• Manual Penalties – In case of a manual penalty, the length of the penalty depends on how severe the penalty is and how badly your site has violated Google’s webmaster guidelines.

Matt also added that in case your site is penalized (Manual penalty only) and you have, in response, made the required changes, it is helpful to request the reconsideration of your site. This action notifies Google that you have made the corrections on your site and that it now adheres to the guidelines. You can also do the same for a recently purchased domain (which you suspect may have violated Google’s guidelines before you bought it) or in case your site isn’t appearing in Google search results.

Hence, to avoid such penalties and complications that could harm your business, you need tweak and tune your site very carefully and skillfully or get the best SEO service provider who’ll handle it for you. This way, you can also focus on other core areas of your business. However, keep in mind that not just any SEO service provider will do. Only an expert SEO service provider will always stick to the search engine guidelines and never beat around the bush.

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Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

We’ve noticed a rise in the number of questions from webmasters about how best to structure a website for mobile phones and how websites can best interact with Googlebot-Mobile. In this post we’ll explain the current situation and give you specific recommendations you can implement now.

Some Background

Let’s start with a simple question: what do we mean by “mobile phone” when talking about mobile-friendly websites?

A good way to answer this question is to think about the capabilities of the mobile phone’s web browser, especially in relation to the capabilities of modern desktop browsers. To simplify matters, we can break mobile phones into a few classifications:

1. Traditional mobile phones: Phones with browsers that cannot render normal desktop webpages. This includes browsers for cHTML (iMode), WML, WAP, and the like.
2. Smartphones: Phones with browsers that render normal desktop pages, at least to some extent. This category includes a diversity of devices, such Windows Phone 7, Blackberry devices, iPhones, and Android phones, and also tablets and eBook readers.We can further break down this category by support for HTML5:
   • Devices with browsers that do not support HTML5
   • Devices with browsers that support HTML5

Once upon a time, mobile phones connected to the Internet using browsers with limited rendering capabilities; but this is clearly a changing situation with the fast rise of smartphones which have browsers that rival the full desktop experience. As such, it’s important to note that the distinction we are making here is based on the current situation as we see it and might change in the future.

Googlebot and Mobile Content

Google has two crawlers relevant to this topic: Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. Googlebot crawls desktop-browser type of webpages and content embedded in them and Googlebot-Mobile crawls mobile content. The questions we’re seeing more of can be summed up as follows:

Given the diversity of capabilities of mobile web browsers, what kind of content should I serve to Googlebot-Mobile?

The answer lies in the User-agent that Googlebot-Mobile supplies when crawling. There are several User-agent strings in use by Googlebot-Mobile, all of which use this format:

[Phone name(s)] (compatible; Googlebot-Mobile/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

To decide which content to serve, assess which content your website has that best serves the phone(s) in the User-agent string. A full list of Googlebot-Mobile User-agents can be found here.

Notice that we currently do not crawl with Googlebot-Mobile using a smartphone User-agent string. Thus at the current time, a correctly-configured content serving system will serve Googlebot-Mobile content only for the traditional phones described above, because that’s what the User-agent strings in use today dictate. This may change in the future, and if so, it may mean there would be a new Googlebot-Mobile User-agent string.

For now, we expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters. However, for many websites it may still make sense for the content to be formatted differently for smartphones, and the decision to do so should be based on how you can best serve your users.

URL Structure for Mobile Content

The next set of questions ask about the URLs mobile content should be served from. Let’s look in detail at some common use cases.

Websites with only Desktop Experience Content

Most websites currently have only one version of their content, namely in HTML that is designed for desktop web browsers. This means all browsers access the content from the same URL.

These websites may not be serving traditional mobile phone users. The quality experienced by their smartphone users depends on the mobile browser they are using and it could be as good as browsing from the desktop.

If you serve only desktop experience content for all User Agents, you should do so for Googlebot-Mobile too; that is, treat Googlebot-Mobile as you treat all other or unknown User Agents. In these cases, Google may modify your webpages for an improved mobile experience.

Websites with Dedicated Mobile Content

Many websites have content specifically optimized for mobile users. The content could be simply reformatted for the typically smaller mobile displays, or it could be in a different format (e.g., served using WAP, etc.).

A very common question we see is: Does it matter if the different types of content are served from the same URL or from different URLs? For example, some websites have www.example.com as the URL desktop browsers are meant to access and have m.example.com or wap.example.com for the different mobile devices. Other websites serve all types of content from just one URL structure like www.example.com.

For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too. For example, if you redirect mobile users from www.example.com to m.example.com, that will be recognized by Googlebot-Mobile and both websites will be crawled and added to the correct index. In this case, use a 301 redirect for both users and Googlebot-Mobile.

If you serve all types of content from www.example.com, i.e. serving desktop-optimized content or mobile-optimized content from the same URL depending on the User-agent, this will also lead to correct crawling by Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. This is not considered cloaking by Google.

It is worth repeating that regardless of URL structure, you must correctly detect the User-agent as given by your users and Googlebot-Mobile, and serve both the same content. Don’t forget to keep the default content, the desktop-optimized content, for when an unknown User-agent requests it.

Mobile Sitemaps in Webmaster Tools

Finally, we receive many questions about what URLs to put in Mobile Sitemaps. As explained in our Mobile Sitemaps Help Center articles, you should include only mobile content URLs in Mobile Sitemaps, even if these URLs also return non-mobile content when accessed by a non-mobile User-agent.

More Questions?

A good place to start is our Mobile Sites Help Center articles and the relevant sections in our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. We also created a thread in our forums for you to ask questions about this post.

Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Written by David Wurtz, Product Manager, Google Web Fonts

In the past, when you created a website or web app, you were largely limited to a few select “web safe” fonts such as Times and Arial. If you deviated from these fonts, you were required to use Adobe Flash or your embed text in images, which introduced a whole new set of trade offs. For example, images aren’t semantic, cannot be translated into other languages automatically, and can be much larger in file size than text. In addition, text in images cannot be copied to a user’s clipboard, read with screen-reading software or easily indexed by search engines.

The good news is, with Google Web Fonts it is now possible to use hundreds of web safe fonts on your web pages. Launched last May, Google Web Fonts allows you to simply choose the font(s) you’d like to use on your webpage, blog, or web app, and embed the snippet of HTML and CSS. In about 30 seconds, you can have beautiful fonts on your pages that will render correctly in the large majority of popular modern web browsers. No longer will you need to use images or Flash to embed the font of your choice.

Unlike Times and Arial, which are references to fonts installed on a user’s local machine, web fonts are served via a browser request (much like an image would be served). That means you can push any web font to a user’s machine. Users will be delighted when they realize these fonts behave just as any other text in Arial would behave.

Some example web fonts, offered by the Google Web Fonts service

The adoption of the web font technology has been rapid. Google Web Fonts now serves roughly 50 million daily requests[1], across roughly 800,000 unique websites[2]. and is growing at about 30% each month. Here at Google, we’re excited about the potential for web fonts to change the very fabric of the web. Beautiful typography makes the web more pleasant to browse, expressive, and interesting.

Here’s to a beautiful Web!

Written by David Wurtz, Product Manager, Google Web Fonts

[1] A request is a single call to the Google Font API for one or more fonts.
[2] We count a unique website as unique domains, except that “www” subdomains are not counted. For example, www.myblog.com and myblog.com would count as one domain. However, sam.myblog.com and sally.myblog.com would count as two domains.

By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY

GLENDALE, Calif. — David Krantz knows as well as anyone that Google is the 800-pound gorilla of the Web.

But in his pursuit of the local-online advertising market — often referred to as the “holy grail” for advertisers, he has a pretty big monkey by his side, too — the Yellow Pages.

Read more…

Paid links: do you still have to worry about them?

Once again, paid links are a hot topic in the search engine optimization community. The website of J. C. Penney had number 1 rankings for many competitive keywords. It turned out that the J. C. Penney website obtained these rankings through buying links on over 2000 pages.

The paid links were reported to Google and many of J. C. Penney’s rankings dropped from number 1 to number 70 and below.

What are paid links?

If you pay the webmaster of another site to link to your website, then the link is a paid link. Paid links can be used to advertise your website on other sites. As long as the paid links use the rel=nofollow attribute, Google doesn’t have any problems with them.

The problem arises when paid links are used to get higher rankings in the regular search results on Google.

Google is very clear about paid links

Google does not like paid links. According to Google’s official statement, you should avoid paid links at all costs:

“[Some] webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.”

Google even has an official form that enables you to report paid links to Google:

“If you know of a site that buys or sells links, please tell us by filling out the fields below. We’ll investigate your submissions, and we’ll use your data to improve our algorithmic detection of paid links.”

Should you use paid links to promote your website?

The problem with paid links is that they work. As long as nobody notices that you’re buying links, paid links can have a positive effect on the search engine rankings of your website. However, as soon as Google detects the paid links your website can get in major trouble.

There are several problems with paid links:

• A competitor might report your paid links to Google and your website will be penalized.
• A competitor might buy links that point to your website, report them to Google and your website will be penalized.
• A competitor buys links to a throwaway domain, sees where they appear, drops the links and waits for you to buy them. Then the competitor reports you to Google for buying links.

While paid links can improve your rankings, they are also extremely risky. If you plan to build a lasting business, you should avoid paid links. The potential damage exceeds the benefits by far.

Your website must have backlinks to get high rankings on Google

Backlinks are very important to get high rankings on Google. That’s why Google works so hard on filtering the wrong kind of links.

The links that point to your website should be from related websites and they should contain the keywords for which you want to get high rankings. Do not manipulate the links to your website by buying links and do not join automated link systems to increase the number of links to your website.

If you want lasting results, focus on ethical search engine optimization methods. There are many ways to get good links (related websites, blogs, social bookmark sites, directories, etc.). IBP helps you to get them all.

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J.C. Penney’s ‘tawdry’ search scam: Google’s failure?
posted on February 14, 2011, at 3:25 PM

J.C. Penney’s pervasiveness online may have less to do with its popularity than with its ability to game Google. The New York Times reports that Penney’s rise to the top of the search giant’s rankings came from so-called “black hat” optimization — creating hundreds of pages of spam links to Penney’s website which fool Google’s computers into thinking the store is popular.

Read more…

by Matt Cutts

Google just launched two-factor authentication, and I believe everyone with a Google account should enable it.

Two-factor authentication (also known as 2-step verification) relies on something you know (like a password) and something you have (like a cell phone). Crackers have a harder time getting into your account, because even if they figure out your password, they still only have half of what they need. I wrote about two-factor authentication when Google rolled it out for Google Apps users back in September, and I’m a huge fan.

Account hijacking is no joke. Remember the Gawker password incident? If you used the same password on Gawker properties and Gmail, two-factor authentication would provide you with more protection. I’ve also had two relatives get their Gmail account hijacked when someone guessed their password. I’ve also seen plenty of incidents like this where two-factor authentication would have kept hackers out. If someone hacked your Gmail account, think of all the other passwords they could get access to, including your domain name or webhost accounts.

Is it a little bit of extra work? Yes. But two-step verification instantly provides you with a much higher level of protection. I use it on my personal Gmail account, and you should too. Please, protect yourself now and enable two-factor authentication.

From Google Webmaster Blog
Written by Zhanlu Wang, Webmaster Tools Team

Webmaster level: All

If you use Google Analytics to track site data, you can now link your Webmaster Tools verified site to an Analytics profile when they use the same Google Account.

Not only will your Analytics profiles be accessible within Webmaster Tools, but you’ll also be able to more easily access a few Google Analytics features:

• View your Google Analytics Referring Pages report directly from the Links to your site page in Webmaster Tools. This report helps you understand the overall trends in traffic volume from referrals, as well as the sites driving those trends.
• Access the Google Analytics Dashboard directly from the Analytics link in the top left bar when you’re on a site-related page.

To link a verified site in Webmaster Tools to a Google Analytics profile:

1. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click Manage next to the site you want, then click Google Analytics profile.



2. Select the profile you want to associate with the site, then click Save.

Note: If your site has multiple owners, each owner will need to link their own account to a Google Analytics profile.

Written by Zhanlu Wang, Webmaster Tools Team

by Matt Cutts

If you want to post some JPEG pictures but you’re worried that they might have metadata like location embedded in them, here’s how to strip that data out.

First, install exiftool using this command:

sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

Then, go into the directory with the JPEG files. If you want to remove metadata from every file in the directory, use

exiftool -all= *.jpg

The exiftool will make copies, so if you had a file called image.jpg, when you’re done you’ll have image.jpg with all the metadata stripped plus a file called image.jpg_original which will still have the metadata.

From SEO Articles

The thought that you should SEO your site before you even develop it seems counter-intuitive, and in many ways, it is. But, not entirely. I’ve been an SEO for over 12 years, and I still can’t get past the fact that optimization continues to be the “after thought,” only coming into play long after the site has been up and running for months or even years.

This mindset needs to change.

The success of a website’s online marketing efforts can make or break many businesses. It no longer makes sense to hire your SEO only after a website has been developed. That’s like doing demographic research after you have already chosen your store’s location and invested thousands of dollars in setting up shop.

Just as demographic research must be done to determine where and how a business sets up their brick and mortar store, SEO is needed before you begin to program the first piece of code or design the first graphic for your website. In reality, development and SEO are so completely intertwined that they both have to be considered together. Failure to do so frequently leads to expensive re-development costs as the SEO requests changes that could have been done during the initial development stages.

You never want to have to rebuild your foundation

I frequently get calls from business owners exploring Search Engine Optimization but want to wait until their website is fully developed and operational before they sign on with any particular SEO company. This strategy seems to make logical sense because business owners often want to make sure the site looks and performs properly before dropping money into a long term commitment to an online marketing firm. But, SEO is just as much a part of the business plan as the website development.

The website marketing plan should really be one of the driving aspects of the website development. But, unfortunately, many of the things related to marketing are typically done wrong during the site development. That’s not to say developers don’t know what they are doing, quite the opposite. Developers can be great programmers, designers, and creators. They’re just generally not great optimizers. And there is nothing wrong with that, it’s just not what they specialize in.

Rolling out a site that operates at less than it’s full performance capabilities is not only a waste of time, it’s a waste of money, even if you’re not quite ready to put the thing into high gear. It doesn’t make smart financial sense to develop a site that has to be re-developed again once you get your SEO involved. Nor does it make good sense to tie your SEO’s hands because you don’t want to invest in site development again. Ultimately, this puts you in a lose/lose situation.

Instead, you want to have a site built from the ground up that is search engine friendly and SEO ready. It’s the difference between being able to give your car a tune-up vs. having to rebuild the entire engine.

SEO before development starts you in the pole position

“Pole position” is a racing term I have adopted for my own company. It basically means to take the first position. When Nascar racers line up at the starting line, the car in the pole position is the one on the inside of the first row. This is the absolute best position to be starting from, giving you the best advantage.

Having a good SEO or SEM on board during the development stage can save countless hours, and dollars, because it starts you off in, what is essentially, the pole position–the absolute best position you can start from.

Here are just a few examples:

Database driven websites often come with their own unique set of SEO related problems. Over the years I’ve worked with a number of different CMS and never have two been exactly the same. Some are more SEO friendly than others, and some are easier to alter than others.

The basics needed for SEO is the ability to create default, dynamic title and description tags, with the ability to customize on a page by page basis as needed. Control over breadcrumbs, image alts, and editable body content that isn’t tied to a manufacturers database is a must. Being able to dictate URLs can also be a sticking point for some systems. Basically, it comes down to the ability to control and customize the environment.

Clean and lean code can improve website performance issues more than most people think. Bloated code can slow down both spidering and page download, both of which can have an impact on a site’s search engine rankings. If the developers use poor coding practices, your visitors won’t see it, but they’ll feel it as usability is diminished on top of everything else.

Quality content is just as important a part of the sales process as your “add to cart” buttons. Many sites are still not designed with content in mind, leaving SEOs to have to insert optimized content wherever they can, rather than having it be a seamless part of each page’s design.

I still hear people say that they don’t want a lot of text on the site because it distracts from the products. This is a valid concern, especially when content isn’t factored into the design process. However, content is part of the information gathering and decision making process. Without it, you lose all of your persuasive ability, and you’re just offering another product they can get anywhere else.

Not every visitor will read your content, but you need it for those that will and do. It’s up to you to satisfy each visitor’s needs and persuade them to buy your products from you, rather than from a competitor.

These are just a couple examples of how planning your SEO strategy before, or along with, your website development strategy is essential. Your website development budget should be a part of your online marketing investment, not a “development expense”.

This is an important point that I think still too few online businesses are getting. If you don’t bring your marketing team in to participate in the website design and development process, you don’t fully understand what’s at stake.

Before developing your website, choosing your design and development should be secondary to bringing your optimization and marketing team on board. The marketing team can help you interview and select the right designers that will build the site within the specifications and parameters that will be necessary for a successful marketing campaign, saving both time and money in the long run.

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