Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and Website Promotion @ an AskBee division

Apple launches Safari Public Beta for Windows

cmircea — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 19:39:46 +0000

Most of you wondered (those who don’t have a Mac) how does a webpage look on Safari.

Apple launched Safari browser for Windows XP or Vista. This is a beta version, but it’s running great.
With this release, even if you don’t own a Mac, you can test your web pages on Safari and see how they look like. I think Apple made the right choice by launching this browser for Windows platform.

Let’s see why you’ll love Safari (as Apple says):

Blazing Performance
Elegant User Interface
Easy Bookmarks
Pop-up Blocking
Inline Find
Tabbed Browsing
SnapBack
Forms AutoFill
Built-in RSS
Resizable Text Fields
Private Browsing
Security

There are also some plugins for Safari available here

All in all, this browser is “must have” for everyone that wants to optimize a web page, along with other browsers: IE, Firefox, Opera, Netscape, etc.

Google Related Searches

cmircea — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 12:25:31 +0000

Googles introduced related searches. If for example you query Google for ‘notebook‘, on the bottom of the page, you will see ‘Searches related to notebook’.

So if the results do not satisfy you, you can check out related searches for your search string, in this case, notebook.

The results for related searches should be completely different from the original search word/keyphrase.

Yahoo already had this feature, it is displayed on top and on bottom of the page. You will see an ‘Also try:’ expression, followed by related searches on yahoo. Yahoo also has an extra option called ‘More options’, where you can get more searches related to your keyword.

Let’s see the differences between Google and Yahoo for the ‘notebook‘ keywords:

Google:

Searches related to: notebook

notebook quotes notebook forum notebook toshiba notebook deals

Yahoo: Also try: notebook computers, toshiba notebook, compaq presario notebook

Yahoo Site Explorer

cmircea — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:12:08 +0000

Everyone is curious how many backlinks a website has. Yahoo search explorer tells you how many backlinks do you have, and how many pages from that website are indexed by Yahoo.

Google has a similar tool, but Google doesn’t show all the backlinks you have.

Another great feature of yahoo search explorer is that you can add feeds of your website, so Yahoo will crawl quicker your website, by letting it know when you made an update to your site.

As Yahoo says:

Find which sites and subpages are indexed by Yahoo! Search!.
Find pages that link to that site or any page. (inlinks)
View the most popular pages from any site.
Submit and track feeds for your sites.
Find what subdomains of the site known to Yahoo!.
See other information Yahoo! detects about your site, such as language.
Delete URLs that you don’t want indexed by Yahoo!.

As you can see Yahoo Site Explorer gives you full access to it’s web database, regarding a specific website.

Google Translate

cmircea — Sat, 26 May 2007 17:37:20 +0000

Google launched Google Translate (beta). After babelfish from Altavista, Google launched Google translate, a similar translation tool.

As Google defines it: “it’s translation produced by state-of-the-art technology, without the intervention of human translators. Automatic translation is also often referred to as machine translation.”

For now there are only few languages you can translate to: English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian. They work to support other languages, but probably it will take time.
Many of these languages are in beta stage, but they are working to improve this translation service. Way to go, Google!

You can translate phrases or even translate an entire web page.

Google Hot Trends by Google Labs

cmircea — Sat, 26 May 2007 17:25:57 +0000

Google definition: “You can see a list of the current top 100 fastest rising search queries in the U.S”

Search queries list is an automated one, and it shows daily top 100 queries (in the US only)

This is an interesting tool, maybe you can find a good niche, or popularity of search terms.
Checkout Google Hot Trends now.

There is also a Google Trends Group, where you can read other users discutions about Google Hot Trends

Read more about Google Hot Trends on Google Blog

Search Engine Keyword Position

cmircea — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 12:51:30 +0000

This free SEO Tool retrieves your web page position (or your competition’s webpage position) in Google, when you search after a keyword. For now there are only Google results, Yahoo and MSN results will also be developed soon.

There’s no need for you to browse hundreds of search engine results, just enter your keyphrase and your webpage, and it will tell you the position and page in search engine results.

Please be aware that Google only allows 1000 queries/day, so if the number of searches is bigger than 1000, this Free SEO Tool will not work.

Make sure you enter exactly the web page you want to check

Example of usage:

keyword = page rank checker
webpage = http://marketing.askbee.net/google-page-rank-checker-tool/

Google Page Rank Checker Tool

cmircea — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 19:55:04 +0000

PageRank is an algorithm used by Google to measure importance of a web page. Since there are billions of pages on the web, google had to find a way to make the difference between them, to place them in order, to rate each page.

PageRank is actually a number, between 0 and 10. So the best page has page rank of 10. There are some pages that have page ranking 10 (Adobe, Macromedia, Apple, etc).

Google Page Rank is determined by number of quality backlinks. If a webpage A has a link to another page B, is like webpage A voted for page B. The more backlinks for a web page, the higher is the pagerank. And another factor for page rating, is the quality of the page A. The higher pagerank for page A, the higher importance in pagerank’s calculation for site B. Simple, clear and logic.

Read more about Google Page Rank on Google official website or on Wiki

Want to improve your ranking? Read this tutorial

SEO Meta Tags Analyzer Tool

cmircea — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 14:40:19 +0000

A quick and easy way to see a website’s meta tags. See how your competition has configured meta tags, helping you to optimize your webpage’s meta data.

This free tool acquires meta keywords and meta description from given webpage. “Meta keywords” is a short list of keywords (keyphrases), comma separated, that are related to your webpage. “Meta description” is a short description of your webpage.

Meta Tags Analyzer Tool is a free tool, which can be used in order to analyze meta tags.

Search Engine Spider Simulator

cmircea — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 18:30:21 +0000

Ever wondered how does you website looks like for a search engine spider?

Spiders (crawlers, bots, robots) are programs that list a website in search engine databases.

Being a SEO Optimizer, you should know how search engines see a page of your site.
Well, here is a tool that simulates search engines behaviour. See how your website is seen by search engines. This is only a simulation, no one knows exactly how a search engine reads a webpage (except for those who built the engine, of course).

An important thing that not everyone knows, is that search spiders cannot read text written on images (jpg, gif, bmp etc), or text written in flash objects.

This tool shows page title, meta keywords, meta description, links and content. It’s very important that your HTML code is W3C valid, otherwise you don’t know how the crawler will see the page.

By running this SEO Tool, you can increase keywords visibility for your pages, aiming for a better position in search results, and it’s an easy and elegant way to see how your competition’s pages are optimized for search engines.

osCommerce SEO - Optimize Your Online Shop For Search Engines

cmircea — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 15:54:48 +0000

OsCommerce Search Engine Optimization

Online Shop Optimization is “A Must” for every merchant. Online shop promotion can be achieved in many ways. Most of them are not free, of course, and basically merchant has to pay monthly fees, in order to be promoted. Online Shop Optimization is one of the most powerful method to promote your online business. The good news is that you have to pay only once for this process, and the results are amazing, although it might take a while before you can see the results.

Most merchants, are using Google Adwords, Overture or other advertising similar tools to promote their products. And, yes they know the price they have to pay for these services.

Think about it, why would you pay to get your products listed first, when you can achieve this for free. That’s when we come in.
If you are using osCommerce, as your online shop solution, I’m sure that if you search for one of your products, your website is not listed in the first pages. This means you’re losing lots of clients. Optimization for search engines means that your online shop will get more free visitors.
These are the steps for this osCommerce optimization process:

Rewrite URLs, and make them search engine friendly (for products, categories and manufacturers)
Generate a sitemap
Generate an XML sitemap for Google
Research Meta Tags: Title, Keywords, Description
Improve website navigation
Provide Froogle feeds
Validate HTML for every page
Writing good content for every product
Adding your website to web directories
Images optimization

Having this process done, your pages will be first in search engine results, way ahead your competitors, your advertising costs will get lower, and your incomes higher.

Interested? Write us an email to get a free quote.