The Rank Magic Blog

Compare Candidates With Google

September 26, 2008 ::: In this intense political period leading up to the elections, Google Labs has come up with a neat candidate comparison tool. You can select the candidates you want to compare, select an issue category (healthcare, economy, Iraq, etc.), and Google will display quotes on that topic by the candidates you selected. Their comparisons aren't just limited to the presidential and vice presidential candidates, but also include many others, for a total of 20 different politicians. And once you see some comparative quotes on a topic, you can click on the SPIN button to see different quotes on that same subject.

So if you're undecided on who to vote for... or just want some quotes from the candidate you favor (or the one you oppose) ... or if you're just a political junkie ... check it out and learn something.

Google's Advice - Guidelines For Google Local

September 21, 2008 ::: If you own a local business, it's important to show up in the local search engine listings. And Google Local gets the most traffic.

Actually, Google Local is part of Google Maps at www.maps.google.com. And Google has some quality guidelines that will make your listings better and hopefully improve your visibility. The full story from Google is here. But these are the salient points:

For details on how to add your site to Google Local, Yahoo Local, and MSN/Live Local, see our eralier blog post here.

Bill Hartzer's Search Engine Tip #2 - The Meta Description Tag

September 19, 2008 ::: Bill Hartzer has an excellent blog on search engine optimization (SEO), and he's started a series of search engine tips that I think you'll find very valuable. Last month I wrote about his first tip, relating to the Page Title.

This month the focus is on the Meta Description tag, part of the HTML code for a web page that describes what the page is about. It's important, not as much because it makes a big difference in your rankings, although it does help a little. What's more important is that it may show up in the search engine results for your page. Here's an example of the listing for one of our clients, found when someone searches in Google for NJ probate litigation lawyers:

The two lines beneath the headline and above the green URL are the beginning of the meta description tag for this page.

It's important to make your meta description tag a meaningful description of what's on your page, and to make it read easily and make sense. It's a mistake to cram a bunch of keywords into it, because when people scan search engine results, their eye will be caught by meaningful sentences , and they'll be more likely to click on such a listing. I recommend Bill's article on the meta description tag. Check it out.

Welcome New Clients

September 17, 2008 ::: We're happy to introduce some brand new clients to you, and a couple that are not quite brand new, but which we haven't previously introduced here.  we're looking forward to introducing them to lots of new customers through the search engines.

• Back Home Safely works for people in New Jersey coming out of rehab and seniors who need accessibility modifications to their homes. They install wheelchair ramps, stair lifts, elevators, bathroom grab bars, walk-in bathtubs and more.
• Doug's Car Care is a full service automotive service and repair shop in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
• Total Health Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Center in Florham Park, NJ specializes in pain management. At the moment, I'm seeing them for physical therapy for what may turn out to be a rotator cuff tear, and their treatments seem to be working well.
• Above & Beyond offers office and meeting room space in New Jersey as well as virtual office staffing and bookkeeping and business support ser4vices.
• 1-2 Remember Studios creates beautiful wedding videos that look like movies.

  

Does Yahoo! Have  a Sandbox?

September 12, 2008 ::: I've been hearing increased conjecture about a Yahoo Sandbox, similar to the well known and largely mythical Google Sandbox. People who find it takes many months for their new web site to show up in rankings in Yahoo or Google often assume that these search engines have some sort of "new site filter" that's keeping them from showing up.

I don't think that's it at all. It takes a certain amount of inbound link popularity for these search engines to think your site is worthy of appearing near the top of the list. Not only does it take time to get quality inbound links, but it takes additional time for those links to be all accounted for by the search engines before they accrue any benefit to your site.

Withy that said, and not to denigrate the importance of link popularity in Google, Yahoo is much more weighted in favor of on-page content. If you have plenty of keyword-rich content on lots of value-packed pages (value to the human visitors to your site) then you'll do better in Yahoo.

Put Blog on Different IP Address?

September 5, 2008 ::: People have been asking lately if they should put their blog on a different IP address from their main web site, which would entail the blog having a different domain name from the main web site. Presumably the reason they'd want to do that is in the hopes of links back to their web site counting more heavily if the search engines think the blog is really unrelated to the web site.

Whether links from external web sites count more than internal links within your own web site has been a source of confusion, but in fact, all links count. There's no reason to worry about different domain names unless you're trying to fool people (or the search engines). From an SEO perspective, trying to fool search engines is a very, very bad practice.

Most companies include their blog as part of their own web site -- as we do here at Rank Magic. In our case, the blog is at www.rankmagic.com/blog. Another approach, equally valid, would be to set up a subdomain so the blog would be at blog.yourdomain.com. Either way is fine for both your visitors and the search engines.

Other blogs of interest

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