datuk\’s ramblings

These are what I believe to be the top 10 most important things (not necessarily in order) that you need, in order to get your website found in the search engines.

There are many other factors as well, but if you follow these guidelines, you’ll stand a much better chance, and you’ll be off to a good start.

1. Title Meta Tag
The title tag is what displays as the headline in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). It’s also what displays in the top blue band of Internet Explorer when your site is displayed.

Your title tag of your website should be easy to read and designed to bring in traffic. By that, I mean that your main keyword phrase should be used toward the beginning of the tag. True there are websites being found now that do not use the phrase in the title, but the vast majority still do as of this writing.

Don’t make the mistake of putting your company name first, unless you are already a household name, like Nascar or HBO. People are likely searching for what you have to offer, not your name.

Your title tag should be written with a capital letter starting the tag, and followed by all lowercase letters, unless you’re using proper nouns. Some people prefer to capitalize every word, too.

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Link Popularity

Link building has always been a hot topic. In the beginning of the web hyperlinks were virtually the only way to get visitors to a site, because search engines were in their infancy. When search engines grew to be the major source of the web traffic, links didn’t lose their weight, as search algorithms started to rank sites according to the quantity and quality of their incoming links. And today links become increasingly important with the growing significance of the new Web 2.0 social networks.

Link Popularity Building Strategies

Thus, links rule the Internet. Once a routine task of a webmaster, link building has emerged itself into a full scale industry with millions of dollars in turnover. Ranking algorithms perceive links as a proxy for a human judgment, or a user’s positive endorsement of a page. The idea is as follows: a user discovers a page, likes its content, links to the page, and the page gets higher ranking. This is the so-called ‘natural way’ of acquiring links.

The natural way of acquiring link works is too slow and can be pretty unfair. New pages on big and established websites are far more likely to be discovered by web users, and these pages will get the major part of the new links (like 90%); while new pages on fresh sites will get trinkets. This is a serious defect of the link ranking system which is discussed more in details in my article Popularity Ranking Faults.

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More than a year has passed since Google introduced NoFollow - a tag intended to reduce comment spam on blogs. Unfortunately, NoFollow has had very little effect on spam, and it seems to be dissuading some people from providing genuine comments.

NoFollow attributes are essentially a way for site authors to mark links as something to be ignored. Search engines would then disregard the links, and not boost the linked pages’ rankings. This would, in theory, deter spammers, who spread comments indiscriminately in the hopes of promoting their own sites. But automated spamming is very inexpensive, and there are still quite a few sites that don’t use NoFollow and that can thereby “reward” spammers. Because of this, the NoFollow deterrent hasn’t proven strong enough, and comment spam is still widespread.

NoFollow is also having an effect on legitimate posts. Since there is often nothing to gain from commenting (in terms of PageRank), some people have become much less willing to leave comments on the blogs of others. This isn’t a universal problem - as Robert Oschler noted on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog about the issue, “You put out a post and in less than one hour you have 15 comments, and you say commenting has slowed down since NOFOLLOW?”

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It’s no secret any more that as broadband becomes more prevalent in the home, the demand for video content has spiked. An interesting new service called ClipSyndicate, which launched in Beta in April, offers web publishers a way to edit and add video news clips to websites and email newsletters, and monetize them in two ways.

The leadership at ClipSyndicate’s creator, Critical Mention Inc., already has an impressive pedigree. The founder and CEO is Sean Morgan, who sold text news syndication service Screamingmedia to CBS Marketwatch for over $100 million a short time after it went public in August 2000.

Vice president of sales Jim Pavoldi promises that ClipSyndicate will do for video news syndication what Screamingmedia did for text news. Touting it as a “one stop shop” for publishers to search for and publish timely and relevant rich media from broadcasters like Bloomberg, Clear Channel Television, and MultiVu, as well as the four major network affiliates, the ClipSyndicate platform delivers a thumbnail, headline, and summary to client sites.

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