Sinai Marketing, a Google SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company, is offering free SEO services on its newly launched affiliate Web site: www.mastergoogle.com. In addition free SEO, Master Google gives other guaranteed paid SEO packages to place companies Web site on top of search engines as well as other Google marketing services such as Adwords management.


Master Google's Free SEO program is a mean to serve startup companies looking to start a presence online. It hopes to make relationships with entrepreneurs and aid any company that is looking to compete online. The free SEO services include Web site optimization, keyword(s) analysis, link building, Web site traffic reports, and weekly Web site ranking reports.

Labels: Google, google features, SEO, SEO guidelines

For small businesses looking to optimize their online presence and take benefit of digital marketing tools, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing are emerging as increasingly precious strategies.

A latest report from digital marketing intelligence firm ComScore revealed that the number of global online searches increased 41 percent, rising from 80.5 billion searches (July 2008) to 113.7 billion searches (July 2009).

Google search engines may be the most excellent investment for a small business' search engine marketing dollars, as Google websites saw the maximum amount of searches - The 76.7 billion Google searches seen in July 2009 mark a 58 percent increase over the last year, and now represent 67.5 percent of the market share.

Yahoo search engines were in second place, yet far behind Google at 8.9 billion searches in July 2009, marking a 2 percent increase year-over-year. AOL was the only search engine to see moribund use, falling 11 percent since July 2008 to just 1 billion searches in July 2009.

Approximately two-thirds of businesses use search engine optimization (SEO) in their marketing efforts, according to a survey from Korn/Ferry International, iPressroom and the Public Relations Society of America.

Labels: Google, google features, New feature in google, SEO, SEO guidelines

Below is a list of best practices compiled by web managers should follow for managing their search engine:

- Choose a good search engine. Acceptable search engines include commercial search engines, search engines that operate as a web service (application service providers), search engines developed by organizations, the free search index available at no cost to federal agencies. For more information, see Choosing a Good Search Engine.

- Practice good usability. Apply the Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines about Search.

- Place a "search" box or a link to a "search" page on every page of your website. The search box or link should be entitled "Search". Usability studies demonstrate that search boxes are most effective when placed in the same position on all pages (usually within the upper third of a web page).

- Provide a long search box. Create your search box (entry field) at least 35 to 40 characters wide. This will allow users to self-detect more errors when they see what they have entered.
- Provide readable search results. Results should be in an easy-to-read format that shows visitors the term they searched for and highlights the term in the title and description of each search result.

- Ensure comprehensive results. Ensure that your search engine, to the extent possible, can search all of your content that is available to the public. This includes providing access to searchable public databases. A new tool that is available to help you with this is sitemaps. You also will want to know how deeply, that is how many levels down from your entry pages, your search engine indexes content.

- Do not search restricted information. Ensure that sensitive, restricted, or classified information or information that contains personally identifiable information-such as social security numbers-is not included in any web-based file that could be retrieved using a government-owned or commercial search engine.

- Provide search help. Many people are unfamiliar or unskilled at using search technology, so provide help, hints, or tips, and include examples.

- Index content frequently. Index the content of your website at least once a month. Content that is added and updated frequently, such as press releases, should be indexed more frequently; however, content that changes infrequently, such as archived or historical documents, may be indexed less often.
- Have a quick response time. Your search engine should produce results in less than three (3) seconds (on average). Monitor and log search response times to ensure that adequate hardware and software capacity is available to achieve this response time standard.

- Ensure relevant results. Routinely identify the common search terms used on your website, evaluate the relevancy of your search results for those terms, and configure your search services to provide the best ranking possible. You should conduct this review at least quarterly.

- Provide an advanced search function. Although usability research indicates that very few people use "advanced" search features, you should allow visitors to conduct more refined, focused searches to achieve more relevant results. For example, you may want to provide options for searching within certain sets of information, databases, or applications.

Labels: Advanced SEO, SEO, SEO Concepts, SEO guidelines

Labels: Advanced SEO, SEO, SEO guidelines, Useful tips for SEO

To enter a query, type in a few descriptive words and press Enter (or click the Search button) for a list of relevant web pages. Since Google only returns web pages that contain all the words in your query, refining or narrowing your search is as simple as adding more words to the search terms you have already entered. Your new query will return a smaller subset of the pages Google found for your original "too-broad" query.
Choosing Keywords

For best results, it's important to choose your keywords wisely. Keep these tips in mind:
- Try the obvious first. If you're looking for information on Picasso, enter "Picasso" rather than "painters".
- Use words likely to appear on a site with the information you want. "Luxury hotel dubuque" gets better results than "really nice places to spend the night in Dubuque".
- Make keywords as specific as possible. "Antique lead soldiers" gets more relevant results than "old metal toys".

Automatic "and" Queries

By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. Keep in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results. To restrict a search further, just include more terms. For example, to plan a vacation to Hawaii, simply type: vacation hawaii

Automatic Exclusion of Common Words

Google ignores common words and characters such as "where" and "how", as well as certain single digits and single letters, because they tend to slow down your search without improving the results. Google will indicate if a common word has been excluded by displaying details on the results page below the search box.
If a common word is essential to getting the results you want, you can include it by putting a "+" sign in front of it. (Be sure to include a space before the "+" sign.)
Another method for doing this is conducting a phrase search, which means putting quotation marks around two or more words. Common words in a phrase search (e.g., "where are you") are included in the search.
For example, to search for Star Wars, Episode I, use:

Star Wars Episode +I
~ OR ~
"Star Wars Episode I"

Capitalization

Google searches are NOT case sensitive. All letters, regardless of how you type them, will be understood as lower case. For example, searches for "george washington", "George Washington", and "gEoRgE wAsHiNgToN" will all return the same results.

Word Variations (Stemming)

To provide the most accurate results, Google does not use "stemming" or support "wildcard" searches. In other words, Google searches for exactly the words that you enter in the search box. Searching for "book" or "book*" will not yield "books" or "bookstore". If in doubt, try both forms: "airline" and "airlines," for instance.

Labels: Advanced SEO, Google2009, SEO, SEO guidelines

The U.S. government is one of the largest producers of content on the Web. But the vast majority of people start their Web experience each day not on a government website but on a commercial search engine. How do we ensure that people are finding the government content they need via commercial search engines and when they search our sites?

Since the mid-1990s, Internet search has evolved from using spiders to "crawl" pages, to algorithms relying on Meta tags, to the point where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is now a leading factor in determining a website's success. We all know it's important, but many of us struggle to do it well.
Search engines are becoming more efficient each day, so government web professionals need to stay on top of this fast-moving technology. Although traditional SEO strategies still apply, to stay at the forefront of search engine technologies, we must be creative and innovative and build good SEO into our day-to-day web operations.

At this New Media Talk, you'll hear from a panel of some of the country's top search experts as they discuss the future of Search and Search Engine Optimization. These thought leaders will cover the latest search strategies, and give us their thoughts on how Government can become a leader in SEO. Join us, and bring your ideas and questions!

Labels: Advanced SEO, SEO, SEO guidelines

Labels: Advanced SEO, SEO, SEO guidelines, Useful tips for SEO

What is It?

Search engine robots will check a special plain text file in the root of each server called robots.txt before indexing a site. Robots.txt implements the Robots Exclusion Protocol, which allows you as a web manager, to define what parts of your site are off-limits to search engine crawlers. For example, Web managers can disallow access to the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), or private and temporary directories, because they don’t want pages in those areas indexed.

Here is some general information about robots.txt files.

Robots.txt File

The robots exclusion standard or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website. The information specifying the parts that should not be accessed is specified in a file called robots.txt in the top-level directory of the website. The robots.txt file is made up of two parts, the User-agent and the Disallow. The User-agent specifies which robots to allow or disallow and the Disallow specifies which directories robots can or cannot crawl. The robots.txt is a gentleman's agreement and some crawlers, such as Google, may ignore the robots.txt file that disallows all crawling.

Example of a recommended robots.txt files blocking crawling of the cgi-bin, scripts, and images directories:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /images/

Why It's Important

The USASearch.gov team has received several emails from federal webmasters informing us that their websites are not being crawled by USA.gov (formerly FirstGov.gov). We have found that most of these sites have disallowed searchbots from crawling their websites. In order for your content to be included in the USASearch.gov, or any search engine, you must allow search engines to crawl your site. USASearch.gov uses the MSN Search index to provide its core results. At the very least, federal webmasters should allow MSNBot to crawl their sites so they can be included in search results for USA.gov, the official web portal of the U.S. government.

In addition, OMB's Memorandum, M-06-02, Improving Public Access to and Dissemination of Government Information and Using the Federal Enterprise Architecture Data Reference Model says: "when disseminating information to the public-at-large, publish your information directly to the Internet. This procedure exposes information to freely available and other search functions and adequately organizes and categorizes your information."

This memorandum assumes that your robots.txt file is allowing search engines to crawl your site. If you are disallowing search engine crawlers, you are not exposing information to search engines, and therefore not complying with this guidance.

Best Practices

*Include the robots.txt file in your server's root directory. This is standard web management practice. If you have robots.txt files in various subdirectories of your site, it will block crawling of that subdirectory and any directory below.

*Search your server for stray robots.txt files and delete any robots.txt file below the root directory.

Meta-Tag Robots Exclusion

Review your pages to make sure you are not using robots exclusion in your Meta tags if you intend for those pages to be publicly disseminated. For those who are not familiar with Meta Tag Robots Exclusion, HTML meta tags can be used to exclude robots according to the contents of a web page. Again, this is purely advisory, and also relies on the cooperation of the robot programs.

Labels: SEO guidelines, SEO Indexing, Useful tips for SEO