Search Engine News from Piedmont Design

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2006/10/match-google-adsense-font-type-and-size-to-increase-ctr/

Great blog about matching Adsense fonts. The post doesn’t discuss whether it’s ethical or acceptable under Google’s guideline to do so. I guess it depends… the old, I’ll know it when I see it rule. But it’s a good tip:

In Firefox - Right click the ad, Select “This Frame” then “View Frame Source”. A new window shows you the whole source code with the CSS code too.
In Internet Explorer - Just right click the ad, select View Source.

For the leaderboard
Title
line-height: 12px; font-size: 11px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
text
line-height: 12px; font-size: 10px; font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;

For the large rectangle
Title
line-height: 14px;font-size: 11px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;
text
line-height: 14px;font-size: 10px; font-family: arial, sans-serif;

SEOmoz Blog | A List of Web Page Quality Signals

SEOmoz gave a list of some web page quality signals today. They are:

Intrinsic Features:

How accurate is the information presented?
How biased or unbiased is the data?
How believable is the content?
How credible is the source?
Contextual Features:

Is the information relevant to the user’s query?
Does the information add value to the subject?
Is the work recent enough to be of value?
Is the source thorough in its presentation?
What amount of information is provided?
Representational Features:

Can the material be interpreted in different way
How easy or difficult is the material for a user to understand?
Does the document state the information concisely?
Is the source consistent?
Accessibility Features:

Is the document accessible?
Does the content present security risks?

When creating a site, these are valuable things to keep in mind. Specifically, you should try to create value-adding, thorough, regularly updating content that is accessible, has a privacy policy and doesn’t use vulnerable code. Search engines probably have a hard time knowing if content is thorough… only that thorough sites tend to be XXX pages with XXX words per page and XX off-site links, but even those sorts of rules have to be a mild signal for Google because there is so much variation. Google clearly values updated content over stale content and I haven’t seen any clear signal showing that Google likes accessible pages or those with privacy policies any better than any others (but it can’t hurt). The only ‘trick’ to be sure of that I see from this is to make sure that pages you create change in some way each time Googlebot visits (I like putting links to recent relevant news storys on the page via RSS). About that quality content, Google can’t tell but people can. Good content attracts backlinks. Backlinks are SEO gold.

SEOmoz Blog | Google News – for traffic, links, and rankings

How to get your site in Google News. The link to submit is http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/request.py

SEOBook goes through how to find who a site links to.

He mentions a lot of things I don’t find valuable… the wikipedia part seems ok. But for me the benefit will be seeing how other people build their link networks and whether a site hordes its pagerank.

http://www.seobook.com/archives/001866.shtml

A brand can still push their main brand name (say Paypal, for example) while promoting their name as being Paypal Payment Solutions. Place more emphasis on your core brand name, but also make relevant keywords look like they are part of the legitimate official name to get a bit more friendly anchor text.

I used this in the Chml Srucnoc competition with my Chml Srucnoc in 2008 slogan and push. This should be considered and adopted anytime you’re doing a link building campaign. The only reason not to do this, is if it would make your brand or site sound awkward to the human readers.

Keyword Group Detection from MSN

MSN gets a bad rap from the searcdh world because they tend to return terrible results that are easily spammed. Their tools are often nice though. The one above allows you to enter a keyword and it will tell you synonyms. I don’t think yahoo or Google’s related tools are nearly this robust. (both list them above the search results when searching).