Search Engine Optimisation

I get people asking me what the secret to search engine optimisation is. I simply tell them to give the search engines what it wants.

Search engines want to delivery the most relevant search results to users with websites that have good relevant content and where that content's credibility has been verified. That's it. Some people get so caught up in the details that they sometime can't see the forest for the trees.

Search engines mainly determine a websites content relevancy by what keywords are in the title, meta description and body content. And it's credibility is rated in simple terms by how many links are going into it and what keywords are being used in those links.

Yahoo! and MSN now accepts Google Sitemaps

It has been announced on the Google sitemap blog that Yahoo! and MSN now accept the Google XML sitemap protocol. This is nothing new with MSN which has already accepted XML maps as an undocument feature. Details are still light on the Yahoo! and MSN sites but I except to see documentation on this in the coming weeks if not days.

Adwords and Search Engine Optimisation

Recently Google has announced it's plan to penalise advertisers who send users to low relevant sites. This has been a long time coming since there has been a growing problem of Adword and Adsense spam where Adwords with low cost per click were getting sent to spam pages full of Adsense ads with high cost per click ads.

What does this mean for the ethical advertiser? On page optimisation that is normally reserved for natural rankings will become even more important for landing pages.

Local Time in Google Adwords

Google Adwords now allows you to set local time and well as time scheduling. This is a welcome change to countries outside of the USA. Hopefully the adwords analytics will also show when during the day that the clicks occur to help marketers make better decisions.

Local Time Zone in Google Analytics

For those who were lucky enough to get a Google Analytics account you may have noticed the new option available to set the local time zone. The only exception to this is if your Analytics account is linked a Google Adwords account.

Still this is a huge step for anyone living outside the US.

Google to offer Dayparting and Scheduling controls

The cat is out of the bag. An article on Search Engine Watch has reported that Google will offer Dayparting and Scheduling controls in the coming weeks. So now I am allowed to talk about it.

Basically what this means is that ads can be set to appear at certain times of the day and on chosen days. This gives greater control to the advertiser to tweak their campaigns much like TV ad scheduling.

I suspect more features will be announced closer to the launch.

Google Trends

There is a new tool in the Analytics space, Google Trends . It lets you slice and dice keyword stats by region and also allows for comparisons between different keywords.

I was playing around with the keyword "belly dancing" and was surprised that Australian cities rank quite highly in the top ten. That makes me wonder if Google is also taking into account where the users ip address is.