Monday, June 29, 2009

15 Nifty SEO Google Alert Tips




You may know that you can get the latest news headline links using Google alerts.
Simply go to http://www.news.google.com and put in a search for something you want to know more about.

For instance, I may want to get updates on news about "search engine marketing". After you get the results on that page, drag down to the bottom. In the middle you will see
New! Get the latest news on search engine marketing with Google Alerts. Click the link to got to the Alerts page.

On the Alerts page you can tell Google how often you want to receive the alerts (I always choose "once a day" and to which email account you want to receive the alerts (some people have many email accounts to choose from). Then hit the "Create Alert" button and you will start receiving the alerts for the term you searched. Easy enough unless you are lazy like me. See, I never thought to investigate the "Type" of search result I was looking for so I was getting just news. I could also have been getting blog, web, video and groups alerts, You also have the option to receive "Comprehensive" alerts. Now I select that option. You can subscribe to alerts in multiple languages.

You can receive up to 1,000 alerts. Woot!

Here are some ideas about how you can use Google Alerts.

1. monitor your competitors - new products, ideas, financial changes - competitive intelligence
2. monitor your customers and prospects - It would be nice to send them a card when they do something newsworthy
3. track your name and your business name - put quotes around the phrases like "Joe Jones" or "Pete's Pies" - what are people saying about you or your company in the blogs?
4. in the "Advanced Search" page you can narrow you search by geographical location, date and other parameters.
5.
Track news about new software releases or version upgrades
6. local news - track the subject and the newspaper

7. Want to know when someone links to your website or blog? Search
link:myblogname.com
8. authors - get ideas for a new article

9. niches - more ideas and what is happening in your niche
10. job seekers - think of the many ways to use this to learn more about the job market

11. when is a new page from you blog included in Google? type in a unique line from your article

12. cache- what a page looked like earlier
cache:sitename.com
13. site: get results from just one website

14. related: what does Google think is related to the site - related:www.
sitename.com
15. inurl: search for the page URLs - inurl:seo
Leave your good Google alert tips in the comments.

Bing Webmaster Tools

Source: bing.com: Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites. Get data on how many pages of your site have been indexed, backlinks, inbound links and keyword performance.

To submit your site to Bing:

To request that Bing crawl your site, submit your site’s domain to http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx.

To submit your Sitemap:

To submit an XML-based Sitemap for your site, copy and paste the below URL into the address bar of your browser–be sure to change “www.YourWebAddress.com” to your domain name–and then press ENTER:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourWebAddress.com/sitemap.xml

Get the SEO Toolkit: The IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit helps improve a Web site’s relevance in search results

More>>http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/default.aspx

New tools for webmasters in the Bing Toolbox

Today we’re really excited to announce the arrival of the Bing Toolbox, a new portal for all you Bing webmasters, publishers, developers, and advertisers out there. The Toolbox is an organized set of tools for the entire Bing community, plus links to our Webmaster and Developer community blogs and forums.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Directories and Ranking

As you may know, Google’s Matt Cutts frequently answers questions from Google users on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel. There are a couple recent ones in which he addresses questions about directories and how they contribute to a site’s rankings.

The first question is:

Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW (Best of the Web) as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sells links?


When Google looks at whether or not a directory is useful to users, Google looks at:

- What is the value-add?

- Do they go out and find entries on their own or do they only wait for people to come to them?

- How much do they charge?

- What is the editorial service that’s being charged?

“If a directory takes $50 and every single person who ever applies in the directory automatically gets in for that $50, there’s not as much editorial oversight as something like the Yahoo! Directory, where people do get rejected,” says Cutts. “So if there is no editorial value-add there, then that is much closer to paid links.”

The second question is:

We sell a software product, and there are 100s of software download directories on the web of varying quality. Could submitting our product to all of them hurt our rankings or domain trust/authority?

Infosys co-chair Nilekani quits to join India govt

Source: NEW DELHI, June 25 (Reuters) – Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys Technologies Ltd (INFY.BO), India’s No. 2 outsourcer, has resigned from the company’s board to join the government, the company said on Thursday.

Nilekani, one of the founders of Infosys, has been invited by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to head government agency Unique Identification Authority of India in the rank of a cabinet minister, Infosys said in a statement.

Nilekani, a former chief executive of the company, was not involved in active management since becoming co-chairman in 2007.

Shares in Infosys, which has a market value of about $21 billion, were up 0.7 percent at 1,771.25 rupees at 0849 GMT in a Mumbai market down 0.5 percent. (Reporting by Devidutta Tripathy; Editing by Ranjit Gangadharan)
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