SEO: Useful Google Operators
We all know Google is the almighty powerful tool. Google supports several operators, which are query words that have special meaning to Google. The operators can actually do a lot of functions and be a powerhouse tool if you know how to use them. Here are a few little neat Google commands to aid with your SEO or basic webmaster work.
One of the best ways to find out if you have run into a site and you suspect that may be spamming; is to a simple search. You can do a couple of popular Google searches for spam within a site like this:
“ buy Phentermine” sites: thedomain.com
or
“online casino” sites: thedomain.com
You can also get Google to list every page on that website to see if they have hidden context or keyword stuffing pages that are irrelevant. You can do a Google search like this. Note there can be no space between the “site:” and the domain.
site:thedomain.com
If you start a query with [allintitle:], Google will restrict the results to those with all of the query words in the title. For instance, [allintitle: google search] will return only documents that have both “google” and “search” in the title. You can use this search to find out some of the title tags that your competitor uses based on a keyword search.
Keep in mind; many of these advanced search operators are accessible through the advanced search page through Google.
Tags: operators, seoSEO: Are XML Sitemaps Actually Important Or Are They The Most Overrated SEO Tactic Ever?
Here lately there seems to be some debate on whether or not XML sitemaps are beneficial to achieving those top rankings on you want on the various search engines, namely Google. Recently, various SEO experts have written some posts on whether or not they think it’s beneficial to use. Here are some of those posts that are worth the read. If you know of any others please let us know and we’ll include them.
As for our opinion, I don’t think it’s crucial to your SEO efforts, but I also don’t think it will hurt you in any way. A site map will not fix crawling issues; but will it help robots crawl a website faster? At Regency Interactive, we create XML sitemaps for all of the websites that we work on (minus any that can’t upload one) and as for the amount of traffic you gain/lose that’s something we leave our clients in charge of so we don’t have any numbers to report on the loss or gain of traffic from Google.
I’m in agreement with Barry and everyone else in that you should try it out on your own for a few months and see what it can do for you. Also, why not even go so far as to post your results as well or even comment on our post and let us know how it worked for you.
Tags: regency interactive, regency interactive corporation, search engine optimization, seo, xml sitemapsSEO: Matt Cutts Interview
Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting sat down with Matt Cutts to do an interview on link building tips so that everyone in the SEO industry would have a better idea as to what you CAN do and what you SHOULDN’T do in regards to link building.
Some key points are:
- You can create widgets and give them to your users, but do not embed hundreds of invisible links pointing back to your website.
- Researching a particular subject/task and documenting what you found out is a good way to get inbound links to your website.
- It’s okay to hire social media experts to help you achieve this inbound links; just make sure they don’t purchase any of those links.
All in all it’s a great insight as to what you should be doing to get inbound links to your website. Currently, this is not a service that we offer at Regency Interactive Corporation, but hopefully in time we’ll be able to offer it for our customers. To continue reading the article and see what other examples/tips they divulge, click here.
Tags: link building, matt cutts, regency interactive, seoMisc: Top 15 Firefox Extensions & My Addiction To These Firefox Extensions
Yes, I know the best medicine is to talk about your addiction. I must admit it……so here goes! *hangs head in shame* I’m a Firefox extension junkie, but I’m really trying to get help I promise. At the time of this post, I had 40 Firefox extensions, but to show my shrink that she was actually helping me I voted 3 Firefox extensions off the island and am now left with 37 extensions. That number alone bothers me; why can’t it be 35 or 40, but then again that’s another issue for her to solve another day.
Here’s a list of my favorite extensions along with some commentary about them.
Autocopy: This is my #1 used extension. I’m so used to it that I now forget to do Ctrl C in other applications. After 5 minutes of trying to figure out why I can’t paste a link into my browser from my email I realize that I forgot to do Ctrl C. Yes, I’m totally addicted to this one.
Forecastbar Enhanced: Not all of my extension are used for work purposes. This one is used so much I can’t honestly remember when the last time was that I watched the local news for the weather. You can actually play meteorologist to all your friends who have no clue about this extension. Then again they may throw snowballs at you when you said it will be sunny tomorrow when it actually snows.
Web Developer: This extension is full of various goodies for web development. It will help you develop and test websites. It also allows you to gain access to the HTML source code, CSS files, and javascripts of interesting sites. You can also disable javascript, redirect and such.
SEO for Firefox: Created by Aaron Wall of SEOBook this tool is very useful in finding out various things about a website when you search Google such as it’s Pagerank, last Google cache date, links pointing to it in Google and Yahoo, .edu and .gov sites linking to the domain and so forth.
Rank Checker: Another resourceful to extension created by Aaron Wall of SEOBook that allows you to check you rankings for keywords on Google, Yahoo and MSN as well as the international versions of these sites. You can also keep track of the changes that transpires with your keywords.
HTML Validator: This one is one of my most used extensions as well as it makes it easy to show a client what exactly they need to fix on their website to make it more browser compliant as well as have the site validate.
IE Tab: This is one beneficial to me so I don’t actually have to use IE to do cross-browser testing when I’m designing websites. I’m not a big fan of IE7 so I’m so glad I can use IE Tab.
Tab Mix Plus: This extension enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities including such features as duplicating tabs, merging tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows. Very useful for things such as XM Radio that automatically pop out into a new window; then you can just merge them together.
DT Whois: Helps you find out useful information about a domain name with just one click. For instance, you can see exactly who owns a site and where it’s hosted at as well.
Download Statusbar: I love this extension too! You can view and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar without the annoying download pop up window getting in the way of your web browsing. Also, sometimes you may not want to download the program right then; thus it stays in your statusbar until you’re ready to install the program.
Flashblock: Lets you block all flash movies from loading; lets you pages load faster without all of the extra junk trying to load at once. You can also determine what sites get theirs loaded automatically.
Firebug: This is one of my latest extension that I recently downloaded. It integrates with Firefox to put a variety of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
User Agent Switcher: This one also is a new extension that I recently downloaded. It adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. You can go from Firefox to Netscape to Opera to IE.
Fireshot: A great extension that lets you create screenshots of a site. However, unlike other extensions, this plug-in provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let you quickly modify your screen captures and insert text and graphical annotations on it. This type of functionality is so useful for me as a designer.
MeasureIt: This extension lets you see how big a certain area is on websites (in pixels) in case you’re trying to emulate a particular look and feel of a website. Makes it easy to guess what size graphics to create in Photoshop and what not.
So these are my favorite 15 Firefox extensions, what are some of your favorite extensions? Leave us some comments about what your favorite ones are that you couldn’t live without. Please tell me there are others like me out there. Maybe we can start a support group together!
Tags: regency interactive, regency interactive corporation, seo, web designSEO: SMX Advanced: Recap From Matt Cutts
Last week we posted recaps of what all went on at SMX Advanced. Well this week Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, posted his recap of what happened at SMX Advanced. It’s always good to hear from people on the opposite end of the spectrum of us SEO companies. Matt also mentioned that he thought there was more blackhat strategies being told than there were last year.
Supposedly, there was a big stir last week with everyone saying there was too much blackhat being talked about at the conference. Although we do not practice any blackhat strategies at Regency Interactive, I personally believe it’s always handy to know what those strategies are so that you are aware of them. Especially, when client comes to you after being burned by other SEO companies you already know some things to check for to see if the previous company did any blackhat practices on that particular site.
To learn what Matt thought about SMX Advanced you can continue reading his article here.
Tags: matt cutts, regency interactive, regency interactive corporation, seo, seo firm, smx, smx advanced, whitehat seo
