I didn’t realize it, but I guess Picasa wasn’t indexed by the search engine that owns it. Now it will be.

I highly recommend you uploading your photos to Flickr and Picasa. The former is owned by Yahoo! and Picasa is owned by Google. That means your photos stand a much better chance of being indexed by at least one search engine if you create accounts and upload photos at both photo sharing sites.

Of course, Flickr is the more popular of the two and photos uploaded at Flickr have always done well in the search engines. I expect that photos uploaded to Picasa will start doing well as well. I also expect that Google’s algorithms will favor Picasa over Flickr. Because of Google Universal, still in beta, you can bet that photos on Picasa will start showing up in search results at Google. You’ll have to be sure to make your images public, otherwise they won’t be searchable.

From the Search Engine Roundtable:

In short, he said, Matt Cutts said Google will roll out in a few weeks a new filter to make sure only two results of a domain (no matter subdomain or folder) will show up for a search.

Should this concern webmasters? I think it should concern webmasters who fall into one category - they’ve got a large website with a lot of subdomains where each subdomain has high rankings on the basis of its nichier parent domain concept. Many large companies use subdomains as a way to build concept websites without having to buy new domains. They want the concept sites to be associated with their primary domain, either because the primary domain is a recognizable brand or because it is easier for them to drive traffic to that subdomain. I can see this practice coming to an abrupt end, as well it should. It will stop these companies from dominating the search results.

Google likely sees this as tantamount to cross links from nonrelated websites in the same network. For instance, Website A, a real estate webite, linked to Website B, a travel-related site, linked to Website C, a technology site, etc. Retail sites that use subdomain as departments within a department store will have to separate their departments into separate domains and let them compete on their own rights rather than use the primary domain as the “leader of the pack” with the subdomains holding on to the Superhero cape. More leverage for small companies.

You don’t have to attend some fancy schmancy PubCon to get some benefit out of it. An article in today’s WebProNews discusses SEO/SEM from a speaking engagement with Melanie Mitchell of AOL. Here are the salient points of the discussion:

• Big companies looking to establish an SEO/SEM strategy need to build a team
• Make the team accountable
• Train the team
• Establish your company’s standards and stick to them
• Provide your team some tools
• Measure and track

I like the list. It illustrates that there is a difference in SEO/SEM for large companies than for small businesses. A small business owner can just go and out and learn about it then do it. A large company has initiatives, goals, missions. Any effort online or off line - even SEO - must conform to the company’s stated direction. That’s why an accountable team who has been trained and given the proper tools is desirable. Every team member can have an area of responsibility related to the overall SEO/SEM mission. Then the team leader should report back to a department head. It’s typical organizational strategy.

The big challenge for big companies is maneuverability. The corporate bureaucracy can make things seem like they’re moving slow. But if you want to succeed online then you need to learn the tools of online business and massage them to fit your company’s mission and position in the marketplace.

This story about a missing man who was found is a little bit creepy. But it does illustrate the power of search. The search terms used to find this man and his wife in Panama were rather obscure. She simply Google two first names and the name of a country. She found the “missing person” in a city within that country just hanging out with his wife.

Jordan McCollum brilliantly pointed out a terrific lesson for anyone who wants to be missing. But there is another lesson to learn here as well. For search engine marketers, you don’t have to target popular keywords to be successful. You just need to target specific keywords that could attract a small population. If you give that small population what they want then you could potentially stay in business just by providing a valuable service to a small target market. And all you have to do is have a well optimized website. That’s something anyone can do with the proper training.

Matt Cutts recently posted a video on Google’s Webmaster Central explaining the use of alt tags. I don’t think I need to rehash everything he covers because he explains it pretty well. But, in a nutshell, the alt tag describes the scene in a photo because search engines can’t scan photos. So this is a necessary element for image optimization. Here are some points for you when you are optimizing your images and photos:

• Use the alt tag - every time
• Be descriptive
• But don’t use too many words
• Make sure your alt tag includes your primary keyword
• Don’t stuff keywords into your alt tag
• Make sure you put the right alt tags with the right images

Alt tags are important for image optimization. Now, you can hear it from Matt Cutts:

These 20 SEO tips are a gold mine. I’d like to elaborate on though:

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html. Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

A lot of webmasters are confused, particularly new webmasters, about the difference between domain names with www at the forefront and those without. If you purchase a domain anme these days you’ll automatically get a redirect from www to the non-www site, or vice versa. In other words, you won’t find a competitor snagging up one while you’ve got the other. Buying one buys both. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have anything to worry about.

When performing your link building campaigns you need to pick one or the other and focus on that. All of your links should point to one domain or the other. Otherwise, you’re splitting your links and killing your link popularity. If you have 50,000 links with 25,000 pointing to www.imagoober.com and the other half pointing to http://imagoober.com then you only have a link popularity of 25,000. By ensuring that all of your links point to the exact same domain name, you’ll double your link popularity. Believe me, that will make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things. That link popularity will determine where you fall in search engine rankings and affect your PageRank. Splitting your links could cost you valuable business.

If you’re looking for a good website metrics package then I highly recommend WebPosition.

WebPosition offers a 30-day free trial so you can test all of its features to see if it truly is something you can use. My bet is that it is. The system provides a means for targeting specific keywords, reporting search engine rankings, optimizing web pages, submitting URLs to search engines, and analyzing conversions - all the things that webmasters must do to succeed online.

WebPosition has proven itself as an industry standard, evidenced by its 2005 award for marketing excellence, given by ClickZ, who called WebPosition the “Best Optimization Product.”

There is a standard as well as a professional edition of WebPosition 4. Which is right for you only you can decide, but I highly recommend this 30-day free trial.

If you’ve been waiting for MSN to start reporting inbound links again, you can relax. It’s finally happened. While using Marketleap to check link popularity, I saw that MSN has started reporting links again. That’s the best news I’ve heard all year. It means that webmasters can now get a realistic picture of where they stand in their link building strategies.

Link building is an important part of being a webmaster. If only two of the top 3 search engines are reporting their links it is really difficult to get a good handle on where you stand. MSN quit reporting links earlier in the year because the search engine claimed it was having problems with data mining. I supposed they’ve fixed the problem.

Another great service Marketleap has added is link popularity checking for specific web pages. This is ideal for webmasters because now you can check to see how well your link bait is working. Before, all you could was check the link popularity of a website. By being able to check the link popularity of individual web pages you can get a better feel for how your specific link bait strategies are working. As far as I know, Marketleap is the only link popularity checker that provides link popularity numbers for individual web pages.

What is the most important ingredient to good website copy? Is it keywords? Is it repetition of those keywords? Links? Good meta tags?

Answer: None of the above.

The key to good website copywriting is to write copy that gets people interested. The first thing that attracts readers’ attention is the headline. Does your headline shout, “Read me?” If not then you likely won’t find many readers. Learn to write good headlines and people will read what you write.

Next, you must have a good lead-in paragraph. That first paragraph, first sentence, and first image are what will hook your readers. The headline gets them to click on your post or search engine listing. The first paragraph will determine whether they read the rest of your content.

Here are some tips to help you write better website copy:

• Write short sentences
• Write short paragraphs
• Use bullet statements
• Don’t just regurgitate what you find elsewhere - make it original!
• Use h1, h2, and h3 tags
• Enhance your copywriting with dynamite graphics

These tips should help you write better website copy. Hope it helps.

In September this year, Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land wrote a long post on the use of the keywords meta tag on web pages. It’s the only article you ever need to read on keywords meta tags. I’m just going to mention three specific things that I found helpful in the article, namely:

• Which search engines support them (and which ones don’t)
• Whether to use commas or spaces
• Are they really necessary?

Is The Keywords Meta Tag Necessary?
I’ll deal with this question first. The bottom line on the keywords meta tag is no, it’s not necessary. Yes, it is helpful sometimes. Do it right and it’ll give you a slight edge. Do it wrong and it’ll be a big, ugly, painful thorn in your side. Quite frankly, the risk of of using the keywords meta tag is bigger than the risk of not using it. Danny said it more eloquently, I think:

Overall, here’s the best advice I can offer anyone dealing with this tag. If you begin to feel confused, concern, tired or uncertain when pondering it, SKIP THE TAG ENTIRELY. It’s not going to hurt you to not have it, and it’s not worth the time fretting about it.

So Which Search Engines Support The Keywords Meta Tag?
That’s a good question. Danny tells a story of an experiment he conducted using fake keywords to see which search engines would retrieve his pages for those keywords in their results pages. His findings match my own experience in this area and this is essentially what he found:

• Google doesn’t support the keywords meta tag
• MSN doesn’t support it
• Yahoo does support it
• Ask supports it

Google, as we all know, get the lion’s share of search traffic online - around 60%. Yahoo! picks up around 15%-25% of the search traffic online, depending on whose figures you believe. MSN grabs a cool 7%-15% and Ask hovers around 4%-7%. (I’m giving windows of latitude here because everyone has their own figures depending on how they weigh search traffic. It doesn’t really matter for this discussion how accurate the numbers are. What matters is that Google is overwhelmingly the largest tool for search and Yahoo! is next. After that, MSNs and Ask’s search traffic percentages are too insignificant to worry about whether you should incorporate the meta tag into your web pages. Google’s and Yahoo!s, however, are. So in the context of this discussion, your keywords meta tag is important at 50% of the search engines.)

If the target market you are trying to reach is more likely to make searches at Yahoo! than Google then you probably want to put more weight on the keyword meta tag. If Google, then I’d say put less importance on the keyword meta tag, if at all. If your target market is more likely to use MSN then don’t worry about it. If your target market is likely to use either Yahoo! or MSN, or Yahoo! or Google, then use it if you think it will help. You can always fall back on Danny Sullivan’s helpful advice to ignore it altogether if you’re confused.

Should the Keyword Meta Tag Include Commas Or Spaces?
Danny goes through great detail to explain this. I’d recommend you read his article. I’m just going to say go with commas because it seems to make the most sense. Yahoo! quality guidelines say to use commas to make a distinction between specific search phrases. I’d have to say I wholly agree with this statement.

Then there are the people who say put a space after the comma and those who argue don’t put a space after the comma (yes, people really argue about that). I can’t see that there’s any difference. It looks better with the spaces, but what matters is the results you’ll get. I don’t think you’ll get any different results either way. Danny doesn’t seem to think so either.

When it comes to your keywords meta tag, it will hurt you more to do it wrong than it will ever help you to do it right. Therefore, if you aren’t sure that you’re doing it right then don’t include keywords< in that meta tag at all.

The natural protocol for search engine robots when they crawl your pages is to index the page and follow all links. All major search engines will follow this protocol unless you tell them not to. Here are some helpful robot meta tags that you might use in order to give specific instructions to the search engines crawling your pages:

meta name=”robots” content=” …” - This meta tag is addressed to all search engines and whatever instructions you give will be followed by all the search engines.

meta name=”googlebot” content=” …” - Only Google will pay attention to this tag.

meta name=”msnbot” content=” …” - Specifies instructions intended only for MSN Live and not other search engines.

meta name=”yahoobot” content=” …” - Instructions specific to Yahoo!

Inside the content=” …” attribute of the meta robot tag, you’ll want to include the following phrases to give specific instructions on how to read, index, or treat content and links on your web pages:

noindex: Tells the search engines not to index a specific page. Your page should not appear in any search engine SERPs if you use this tag with the robots meta. If you use it with googlebot then Google will not index it but other search engines will.

nofollow: This attribute tells the search engines not to follow the links on your page and crawl the pages that you are linking to.

nosnippet: This attribute instructs the search engines to remove the snippets from the SERPs. Whether your snippet (description) is coming from your web page or ODP is irrelevant. This attribute says “Don’t use a snippet at all.”

noodp: This attribute tells the search engines not to use the Open Directory Project (ODP, aka DMOZ) for creating the snippet in the SERPs.

noydir: This is a Yahoo! specific robots tag and tells the robots not to create a Yahoo! titles and snippets in the Yahoo! directory.

noarchive: This attribute tells the robots not to cache a web page or archive it at all.

unavailable_after:[insert date here]: This attribute tells the search engines to remove an indexed page after a specific date.

These robot meta tags can be used in your robots.txt template to instruct the search engines on specific ways to treat your web pages. Be careful in using these and if you want only a specific search engine to respond to your orders you’ll need to include your instructions specifically for that search engine so you wouldn’t use the robots meta tag but the tag specifically for the search engine you want to address.

Aaron Wall had an interesting post on his blog today. In response to Matt Cutts’ blog post about paid posts, he addresses scientific research that is sponsored by big pharma companies and how the information on those “research” papers is no more accurate the blather of people paid to write about products. It’s something I haven’t thought about, but he’s right.

This made me wonder just how SEO and research go hand in hand in website content. Many clients will ask us to ghostwrite their website content and massage it to look like their competitors’ content. We always try to discourage this for a number of reasons:

• First, you don’t want to create even so much as an appearance that you are taking content off of someone else’s website; that could land you in legal trouble
• Secondly, original content is king; your content will brand your company - do you really want it to look like someone else’s?
• Most importantly, in order to succeed in the marketplace, you need to stand out; customers want to do business with a company that has a unique position in the market

If your content looks like everyone else’s content then you will not stand out. Your content needs to be unique so that potential customers can see where you fit in within the market niche that you serve, but it also needs to be unique for the search engines. SEO and content are like the right and left glove. Don’t get them mixed up.

Yahoo! has published its top search for 2007. Any guesses who’s on top? If you guessed Britney Spears then pat yourself on the back. It seems the celebrity just can’t be out Yahoo!ed.

It really shouldn’t come as no surprise to anyone. This isn’t the first time Britney has topped the Yahoo! chart. But the news does serve as a testimony to the difference between Yahoo! searchers and Googlers.

Google hasn’t released their figures for this year yet, but you can see what they were last year. If that is any indication of Google search trends then you can bet that the top searches this year will have something to do with search, Web 2.0, or some aspect of online life. People on Yahoo! it seems are still stuck in the real world.

The interesting thing about the Yahoo! search statistics is that they are broken down by category. But I’m confused about some of the titles of the categories. Why do we need to know the top 10 “send offs?” And did Saddam Hussein really dominate the whole year in news? These are very interesting figures. At any rate, do with this information what you will, just don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

This article is a good article. Everyone needs a website, right? Well, yeah, but having a bad one can do you more harm than good. But what does good mean? One thing it means is taking the time to SEO it properly. But SEO is only one thing, a very important thing:

* Is your site search engine friendly?
* Have you optimized your site for specific and relevant keywords?
* Have you acquired a network of high-quality, relevant links?
* Have you utilized online PR or social media marketing for its SEO benefits?
* Does your navigation menu provide access to your entire site?

So which of the above SEO criteria is most important? All of them.

A search engine friendly website uses the right keyword phrases to reach the right target market. It also uses the latest design techniques and pays attention to such “invisible” clues as code-to-text ratio. Inbound links count - a lot. But the wrong kind of links will hurt you. One often overlooked aspect of website marketing is public relations and social media marketing. Don’t forget about these methods of marketing. Yes, they do offer SEO benefits. And, finally, how navigable is your website? Make it easy. It counts. Contact Brick Marketing.

Live Search - aka MSN Search - has been showing some of the most aggressive duplicate content filtering I’ve ever seen across any search engine of late.

If this is true, it could have some far-reaching consequences for webmasters and SEOs. While Google doesn’t necessarily follow MSN, nor does Yahoo!, often times you will find the three big search engines being affected by the same, or similar policies. This is no doubt an algorithmic change for MSN. If so, it may need tweaking. Nevertheless, until then, be on the lookout for declining SERP results, especially if you have articles and press releases floating around that are also on your own website.

It’s not a given, of course. But if MSN is flagging press releases and other information normally found in various places as duplicate content then you’ll want to alter one or both of your sources of information in some way. In other words, rewrite that press release so that it doesn’t appear on your website exactly as it does in the distribution sites that you visit. It’s just a precaution, not a fix-all.