Esther C Kane » search engines http://estherckane.com Internet Marketing / SEO - Tips, News and More Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:22:44 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1 To Web Designers: Listen Up! http://estherckane.com/2010/10/to-web-designers-listen-up/ http://estherckane.com/2010/10/to-web-designers-listen-up/#comments Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:40:00 +0000 eckweb http://estherckane.com/?p=653 The great majority of websites that we get here at Eckweb are sites that have already been built and have already been online.  A great majority of those site owners claim that their web designer told them they know how to market their sites.

I have no way of knowing if this is actually true or not but I do know that the websites, for the most part are in no way optimized or prepared for the search engines.  Some aren’t even ready for the public, but that’s another story!

After speaking and consulting with multiple designers over the years I do believe that there’s a sense of  “it’s not important” – from the designers’ perspective.  Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m writing this post to once again emphasize how important every SEO factor truly is.

It’s Not Just Me Saying This

Here’s an excerpt by Adam Audette at SearchEngineLand.

We can think about SEO ranking elements as signals to a search engine. Each one of them communicates something to the engine, and is considered (or not) and applied to the internal algorithms. When all of these signals are pointing in the same direction, powerful things can happen.

This is especially well illustrated with the problem of duplicate content and canonicalization. There are several ways sites can communicate to the engines which URL is to be treated as the canonical, including:

  • 301 redirects
  • XML sitemaps
  • rel canonical tags
  • Internal linking
  • External linking

Think for a moment about a typical website. It is likely to have many pages linking internally with multiple versions of URLs. The classic home page problem, for example, where sites often link to both mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.html, is quite common. That doesn’t begin to cover the potential duplication that occurs on the enterprise level with large, complex websites and dynamic content.

This article speaks more about Canonicalization issues but the take home message is the same.  The details of SEO are extremely important when it comes to marketing websites.  If there are 200 different ranking factors that Google takes into consideration, and your competitor has fulfilled 130 of them but your website has only fulfilled 70 of them.  Well, guess who’s going to rank higher?

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported.

]]> http://estherckane.com/2010/10/to-web-designers-listen-up/feed/ 0 Comparing Google and Bing Search Results http://estherckane.com/2009/07/comparing-google-and-bing-search-results/ http://estherckane.com/2009/07/comparing-google-and-bing-search-results/#comments Thu, 02 Jul 2009 01:54:56 +0000 eckweb http://estherckane.com/?p=422 Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has been getting quite a bit of press lately and for good reason.  It’s the first search engine to present a real challenge to Google.  But, I can say anything I want, the proof is in the pudding (as they say) so I thought I would do a side by side test between Google and Bing.  Let’s see what the results show.

Keyword Phrase: Seo Services

Google search results gave me 10 agencies that provide seo services
Bing search results gave me 10 agencies that provide seo services

Keyword Phrase: Name Tags

Google search results gave me 7 companies that provide name tags
Bing search results gave me 9 companies that provide name tags

Keyword Phrase: South Florida Lawyer

Google search results gave me 8 South Florida law firms
Bing search results gave me 9 South Florida law firms

Keyword Phrase: Digital Imaging Services

Google search results gave me 4 companies that provide digital imaging services
Bing search results gave me 8 companies that provide digital imaging services

Keyword Phrase: Denver Limousine Services

Google search results gave me 8 companies that provide limousine services in Denver Colorado
Bing search results gave me 9 companies that provide limousines services in Denver Colorado

Keyword Phrase: Counseling Services in Atlanta

Google search results gave me 7 listings of counseling centers in Atlanta Georgia
Bing search results gave me 8 listings of counseling centers in Atlanta Georgia

Keyword Phrase: Spiritual Life Coaching Services

Google search results gave me 10 listings of spiritual life coaches
Bing search results gave me 8 listings of spiritual life coaches

So, out of 7 searches, the results are not so amazingly different.  Some of the search results were the same but most were not.  Although most of the time Bing brought back more relevant searches than Google, the differences were not that extraordinary.  In other words, it’s not as if Bing gave me double or more search results that were better than Google.  Bing just gave me 1 or 2 search results that were more relevant than Google.

Of course, this is only for 7 searches.  It would be interesting to run a sample with 100 or 1000 searches – I don’t have the time for that.  But I did want to see for myself if the commercials Bing.com puts out are true.  Maybe if they’re compared with other search engines, but when compared to Google, it’s not so different.

But, having said that.  It’s nice to have another search engine that does return relevant results.  Now I can do my searches on Google.com and Bing.com and I’ll know that I’ll be getting good relevant results for my time.  So, yes, Bing is the first search engine to really give Google a run!

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