Pod1 Blog

As the SEO industry grows the number of keyword research tools grows along with it too. There are tens, if not hundreds, of keyword research tools and extensions utilising search engine APIs to present the user with all possible synonyms and relevant keywords.

One of the recent trends in keywords research tools development includes making the results more pleasant for the eye. They still use the same Google, Yahoo or other search engine’s API, but they can present the query output in a nice and logical way, particularly useful for those who prefer to see a visual representation of the data. Here are some of the best ones out there right now:

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 1 – Keyword Eye

http://www.keywordeye.co.uk

Very visual and useful keyword research tool showing the results in a tag cloud where keywords with higher number of monthly searches are displayed bigger and in different colours.

The monthly search volume is shown when you hover over the keyword. You can also add the keyword to the right hand side panel and then export all keywords to csv, excel or text file.

The keyword research tool also includes a 3D view of the results tag cloud:

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 2 – Thesaurus

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Although Thesaurus is not the first keyword research tool you would think of, it has a nice feature called Visual Thesaurus which is an interactive tool that allows you to discover the connections between words in a visually captivating display. Word maps let you search for just the right word and then explore related concepts, revealing the way words and meanings relate to each other. It’s a word-lover’s delight, with more than 145,000 words and 115,000 meanings organized in an innovative and intuitive design.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 3 – Google Wonder Wheel

Just search Google for anything and switch the standard view to Wonder wheel view on the left.

Useful visual keyword research tool which allows you to see relevant search results to your query in a unique semantically relevant and graphically design way.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 4 – Google Trends

http://www.google.com/trends

Google Trends is not a keyword research tool as such, but it provides extremely useful visual representation of the number of Google searches for the particular keyword during the chosen period of time. We found it very useful when planning the SEO strategy, especially for retail and travel ecommerce clients – you can easily spot when people search for holidays, resort destinations or specific gifts.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 5 – Google Sets

http://labs.google.com/sets

Google Sets is an experimental keyword tool at Google labs that creates sets of items based on a couple of seed keywords. You simply enter one or several words and the tool generates a list of related terms.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 6 – Microsoft adCenter Labs Keyword Research

http://adlab.msn.com/Keyword-Forecast/default.aspx

This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords. Enter keywords separated by semi-colons and click the submit button.

Visual Keyword Research Tool No. 7 – SEO Keyword Tag Cloud Generator

http://www.scotiasystems.com/keyword-tag-cloud/keywordcloud.php

This tool can be used to analyse keyword placement and frequency on any website. It displays a 3D tag cloud for each of the ‘SEO-sensitive’ areas of the page, e.g. different tag cloud for meta keywords, image titles, page titles, headings, etc.

You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.

Google has announced the latest change to their ranking algorithm on Friday 20^th August in their Webmaster Central blog post. Google now shows more search results from the same domain. The search engine giant claims that “for queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, we’ll now show more results from the relevant site”.

For example, one of Pod1 ecommerce design clients, the women’s shoes retailer Kurt Geiger, has now 7 out of possible 10 search results for the query ‘Kurt Geiger shoes‘:

Although Google claims that they “expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page”, it’s arguable whether they should do it and if this is actually what users really want.

One thing is certain though. There are some very serious SEO implications that every search engine marketer should consider in near future. Firstly, the importance of a ’strong’ website domain is more important than ever. Secondly, SEO specialists and brand owners have to consider optimising the site for branded search terms as well as generic key words. Thirdly, the move has definitely favoured brand owners websites and has certainly disadvantaged affiliate / price comparison websites which traffic from brand name related search terms will drop as their listings would have suddenly dropped in rankings from position No. 2 or 3 down to No. 6 or No. 7 or even lower.

The algorithm update has already sparked a wildfire of comments in the search engine marketing community. Some say they really like it as it’s easier to find what they really want. Others don’t like it and they feel their choice is restricted when viewing search results. My personal opinion lies somewhere in between as I do think it’s a useful feature and will definitely help smaller businesses to defend their brand from more powerful comparison and affiliate websites. However, I also think that the number of possible listings should be restricted to 3 or maximum 4 top spots in SERP. My another personal disappointment was when I realised that the update is not resolving the issue that many big jewellery and retailer brands, including Links of London, face when dealing with fake website listings.

This is the second post on the subject of International SEO / Multilingual SEO (read the first one here: International SEO / Multilingual SEO – Part 1). It’s based on the knowledge and data obtained at the International SEO training course I attended in June at Econsultancy London. This post will focus on the global search behaviour, how different nations search the web and how SEO strategy should be adjusted when optimising ecommerce website for different languages and countries.

International SEO – European Search Overview By Country

In March 2008, ComScore published rather interesting breakdown of all searches conducted in Europe.

International SEO – Localised vs. Non-Localised Website

This is always the first important challenge to tackle when implementing international SEO strategy. Should I translate and localise the whole website or would it be better to just build a cheaper landing page and keep the rest of the site in English? As always, it turns out that it depends. If you target Finland, Sweden, Norway then the landing page will be enough – the vast majority of population speaks and uses English online. Landing page should be also enough in Spain and France where relative quality of SEO is lower therefore it may be easier to successfully implement international SEO / multilingual SEO strategy on the website.

However, if your international SEO targets Denmark or Germany then the translated version of the website is a must. This is due to the high level of ecommerce websites saturation and high quality of local SEO. You should also translate the site when you think about getting into the Russian or Japanese markets as both countries trust websites in native language more, and users are more likely to buy from a localised website. In Russia, there’s also another important international SEO factor: Yandex (biggest search engine) prefers .ru domains hosted in Russia.

Having said all that, it’s absolutely crucial that each page is not only translated but also localised using search terms that real people are likely to search in this country. Also, there isn’t always a need for translations. In many countries, the English term or the mixture of English and native language is used more often than the translation. Both Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool and Google Trends are perfect tools for identifying these terms.

Image source: Oban

International SEO – Global Online Retail Stats

• 85% of world’s internet population buy online (Nielsen 2009)
• 40% growth in 2 years
• 875 million purchasers
• 99% South Koreans buy online
• 37% Egyptians buy online
• 67% only served domestic markets (KBOR 2007)
• 20% served two or more markets
• Online shoppers in EU – twice as likely to shop across borders (IMRWorld)
• 57% EU shoppers never get adverts from outside domestic markets

International SEO – Global Online Retail: China

• 353 million internet users
• 90% of users surveyed buy online in 2008 (JUPITER)
• Chinese prefer Baidu to Google
• Spend increased from 2.4-6.4 billion
• High % Blog readers

International SEO – Global Online Retail: Japan

• 94 million internet users (73% penetration)
• 97% buy online
• 66% buy regularly
• Use Yahoo 45% , Google 55% and Baidu
• 72% prefer US sites
• Spend increased £36.8-56.6 billion

International SEO – Global Online Retail: South Korea

• 34 million internet users (70% penetration)
• 99% buy online
• 75% buy regularly
• Use Naver, Duam (not Google)
• Spend increased £9.6-12.6 billion
• 12% shop on non-domestic sites

International SEO – Global Online Retail: Brazil

• 50 million internet users (26% penetration)
• 10 fold increase in spend (2001-2009)
• £3.2 billion spent 2008
• Very active retail ecommerce users
• 35% – Electronics, 12% Books
• 55% believe online buying is secure
• Use MSN apart from Google.

International SEO – Global Online Retail: Scandinavia

• By end of 2010 – 80% internet penetration
• Sales to reach £10.65 billion
• Penetration highest in Europe
• Google covers 80% (av. per market)
• 55% internet buyer penetration
• Heavily influenced by online research
• Top 10 countries selling online

International SEO – Global Online Retail: Germany

• Nearly 70% buy online
• 30 Million online buyers (UK 20 million)
• 97% Buy online
• 65% Regularly
• More spend than UK
• Germans tend to mix English and German words in search terms, e.g. ‘cheap flüge’

You can read more about Pod1’s SEO Services London and general ecommerce design offered by Pod1.

This is my third post on Magento SEO features where I expand on some of the less-known Magento SEO features which are essential in every webmaster’s and SEO expert’s day-to-day job. You can read two previous posts here: Magento SEO URLs, How To Optimise Magento Website URLs and Magento SEO Page Titles, How To Optimise Magento Page Titles.

Magento SEO – Google XML Sitemap

Magento has a great Google XML sitemap generation tool (System > Configuration > Google Sitemap) which allows you to customise pretty much anything there is to customise, including different frequency and priority value for different types of pages. For example, you may want to assign to category pages frequency ‘daily’ and priority of 0.8, but you may want to set those 2 to ‘weekly’ and ‘0.5’ on all content pages.

The tool also lets you configure generation settings, including how often the sitemap.xml should be updated, at what time during the day and who’s the main point of contact if something goes wrong.

Once configured, all you need to do is go to Catalogue > Google Sitemap and generate a new sitemap.xml file.

Note: The path where you save the sitemap to must be writable – with appropriate server permissions

Magento SEO – Sitemap Page HTML In Magento

There is a very handy Magento extension module which allows you to create a sitemap page featuring links to all existing/active Magento pages – Advanced Sitemap

Magento SEO – Default Robots Meta Tag In Magento

You can quickly change the default robots meta tag for all pages in System > Configuration > Design > HTML Head. Four options cover all possibilities: noindex,nofollow ; noindex,follow ; index, nofollow ; index,follow.

Magento SEO – Nofollow Link Module In Magento

Pod1 developed a custom module allowing to change the value of link’s rel=“” property depending on which page you’re on. For example, our clients’ websites have only few ‘dofollow’ credit links to the Pod1 website, and all others are marked with ‘nofollow’ value. This prevents search engines from considering it as spam.

Magento SEO – Add Miscellaneous Header Tags In Magento

This feature (System > Configuration > Design > HTML Head) can have many useful applications but what Pod1 SEO London team found it particularly useful for was adding Google Webmaster Tools verification tag without having to involve developers in such small and easy task.

Magento SEO – RSS Feeds

The default Magento configuration allows you to generate several RSS feeds, including ‘New Products’, Special Products’, Top Level Categories’. Just go to System > Configuration > RSS Feeds and enable those you need. Then go to www.yourwebsite.com/rss and click ‘Get Feed’.

Magento Google API – Google Analytics

The default Google Analytics plugin in Magento provides the basic tracking code. All you need to do is go to System > Configuration > Google API > Google Analytics and enter UA number of you site (as shown in your Google Analytics account settings). This will automatically generate the standard tracking code and add your UA. If you want to start tracking ecommerce data you may need this extension Fooman_GoogleAnalyticsPlus.

Read previous posts on Magento SEO Part 1 – URLs and Magento SEO Page Titles, How To Optimise Magento Page Titles or more about Magento Ecommerce Design, SEO Services London and Fashion Ecommerce  Web Design

Last week I attended the International SEO training course with Greig Holbrook from OBAN at Econsultancy London which helped me to understand how different cultures and nationalities search and behave when buying online. This is the first post summarising those findings and focusing on localised/translated websites SEO, best practices when optimising multilingual websites for search engines and features of local search engines. I only feature facts I found particularly useful for Pod1 ecommerce design clients, but they can be transferred onto any SEO campaign.

Why International SEO & Multilingual SEO?

Over 70% of internet search queries are not in English. This number continues to grow along with increasing online spend. There are many international search engines and Google is not as popular in every country.

International SEO – Translated SEO vs. Localised SEO

This is the first major question to answer when starting International SEO campaign. Yes, translated SEO will cover the basics, but it’s important to have support from someone on the ground, someone who knows what the most popular way of saying or searching particular phrase is. For example, in Germany, word ‘teenager’ is a more popular search term then its German translation ‘Jugendliche’.

No matter how tight the deadline is, don’t just translate every English tag literally into another language as, in most cases, it won’t make any sense to the user or to search engines. Other languages have different ways to say the same thing and each page title, heading, paragraph and URL must be translated using local vocabulary and gramma. For example, if you were to optimise the Visit Britain page featuring the Guide For Wimbledon for Brazilians, you should not just translate it into Portuguese, but check what users are likely to search in their own language instead, even if it doesn’t make sense to you in English, e.g. “Touristic attractions in London: Wimbledon”.

International SEO Best Practices – On-site optimisation

Local Hosting – search engines look up website’s IP address location and rank your websites higher in this area/country

Local Top-Level-Domains – try to launch local version of the site on the local TLD if possible, e.g. .cn, .fr, .de. It does compromise the link building but in some countries (e.g. Russia) using local TLD may be more beneficial than having thousands of inbound links.

If you can’t publish the site on different local domains then use Google Webmaster Tools to set the geo-targeting. However, this only applies to Google so in countries where Google is not the biggest search engine player you may need to consider other options.

Local Keyword Research – use local research tools to find popular search terms and don’t just translate them from English.

International SEO – Off-site optimisation

Using English based directory or press release websites may not always do the trick here. You may need to research local press release distribution sites, niche directories, local Yahoo Answers equivalents, local partner websites which can feature the link to your website.

Make sure that, as you would do in English SEO, you use translated and localised keywords in the link anchor text.

International SEO – Local Search Engines & Ecommerce Behaviour

International SEO – Russia

Yandex has 58% of the market in Russia with Google trailing behind with 24%. Yandex used to be a social media search engine so it favours blogs, social bookmarks, networks, etc. Important SEO factor is that you must have a .ru website hosted locally; otherwise you will struggle to rank well. Russians don’t particularly like ecommerce websites in English so fully localised translated version of the site is another must-have.

International SEO – China

Baidu has staggering 69% of the market in China with Google only on 28% (might be even less very soon – read Google vs China). Baidu favours websites hosted locally, but you don’t necessarily need a .cn domain to succeed. Keyword density is a very important ranking factor for Baidu. It also treats meta keywords and descriptions as ranking factors – unlike Google.

International SEO – Czech Republic

Seznam has over 60% penetration in Czech Republic so optimising only for Google may not result in the desired outcome.

International SEO – France

Voila search engine favours websites with higher number of inbound links so link buying might be the way to go.

International SEO – Hong Kong

If you market for customers in Hong Kong you should focus mainly on Google and Yahoo.

International SEO – India

Rediff search engine is capable of displaying mixed results featuring different Indian dialects so more translation and localised versions of the site might be needed.

International SEO – South Korea

Naver search engine likes social media and blog results so it’s important to engage in these SEM activities.

International SEO – Japan

No matter what search engine you optimise for in Japan, it has to be fully localised as Japanese people prefer to have everything translated anyway.

International SEO – Italy

Italian post office offers a very popular alternative method of paying for goods purchased online – BancoPoste. Essentially it’s a pre-paid, limited debit card which you can top up directly from your bank account or at the post office. If you sell goods online to Italian market it’s crucial you offer this type of payment.

Since International SEO is difficult to explain in just few paragraphs, I will split it and publish another 3 posts (on Global Search Behaviour, International Internet Penetration and Global Social Media) in next few weeks.

The saga continues (see Google threatens to pull out of China) and the statement below from Google’s blog shows how reluctant it is to pull out of such a lucrative market, while at the same time trying to remain loyal to its own pledge of providing uncensored results.

The latest plan is to provide a landing page on Google.cn which then links to Google.com.hk allowing users to continue to perform uncensored searches.

“We currently automatically redirect everyone using Google.cn to Google.com.hk, our Hong Kong search engine. This redirect, which offers unfiltered search in simplified Chinese, has been working well for our users and for Google. However, it’s clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable—and that if we continue redirecting users our Internet Content Provider license will not be renewed (it’s up for renewal on June 30). Without an ICP license, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.”

“Over the next few days we’ll end the redirect entirely, taking all our Chinese users to our new landing page—and today we re-submitted our ICP license renewal application based on this approach.”

It remains to be seen how China will react to this as there is always the chance they will simply block the new landing page leaving users no choice but to use the censored version.

Full article on Google’s Blog

This is the second post on Magento SEO features; you can read the first one here: Magento SEO Part 1 – URLs.

In this post I want to focus on Magento page titles and meta description tags which are both very important factors in optimising Magento ecommerce website for search engines. Magento includes numbers of SEO tools and features allowing you to have a full control over editing or generating optimised page titles and descriptions, below are some of them.

Magento SEO – Page Titles & Meta Descriptions On Magento Content Pages

Optimising Magento content page titles is made very easy. You don’t need any development skills and you can edit the page title by going to: Magento > CMS > Manage Pages > chose the page > General Information > Page Title. You can edit the meta description in a similar way, just go to ‘Meta Data’ instead of ‘General Information’.

Note: Google will only look at first 67-68 characters in Magento page title and approximately first 155 characters in meta description. Anything beyond that will still be displayed in user’s browser but will be truncated in search engine results and discarded from search engine indexes.

Magento SEO – Page Titles & Meta Descriptions On Magento Category Pages

You can easily edit category page titles in Magento by going to: Magento > Catalogue > Manage Categories > your category.

Note: Remember to try to make each Magento page title and description unique so you don’t have too many duplicate content issues.

Magento SEO – Page Titles & Meta Descriptions On Magento Product Detail Pages

Magento displays the product name as a default page title. Although that’s better than nothing, this isn’t always enough when optimising Magento ecommerce website.

One easy way to approach optimising Magento product pages’ titles is to put all optimised page titles and descriptions into the product import file (in html_title and html_description column/attribute). This will automatically overwrite all default page titles. This solution might work for Magento ecommerce sites which don’t update the stock very often but might not be the best solution for websites which have tens of thousands of products which change every day.

In my opinion, the best, the quickest and the most feasible way of optimising Magento product page titles is to automate page title generation using product and category names in conjunction with static strings.

The biggest advantage of developing a custom Magento page title/description generation module is being able to specify the pattern you want to use for all Magento page titles / description across the site For example, you can create a rule which says: for all product pages generate the page title using this pattern: “%PRODUCT%, %SUB_CATEGORY% %CATEGORY%, Designer Clothes %STORE_NAME%”, e.g. “RONALD Cotton Lycra Top, Women Clothing, Designer Clothes Dia Boutique”.

Pod1 Magento Ecommerce Design developed a custom module like that for all our Magento clients and it will be available to the Magento Community very soon (watch out for the Artur SEO module).

Read previous post on Magento SEO Part 1 – URLs or more about Magento Ecommerce Design, SEO Services London and Fashion Ecommerce  Web Design

This is the first post from the series of articles/guides discussing Magento SEO features. I will highlight the best Magento SEO tools and extensions, how to use them effectively and what to watch out for when optimising Magento ecommerce websites for search engines. I will focus on optimising Magento URLs, meta data, pages titles, image alt tags, link titles, HTML code itself, redirects and other topics relating to Magento SEO and webmasters’ tasks, e.g. sitemaps.

Magento SEO – URLs Rewrite Management Feature

Search engine friendly URLs became a very important ranking factor for all ecommerce websites. The URL Rewrite Management is one of my favourite Magento SEO tools. It allows you to change (re-write) dynamically generated URL like http://www.kabiri.co.uk/catalog/product/view/id/7828/category/568 to the search engine friendly URL like this one http://www.kabiri.co.uk/jewellery-1/necklaces/radio-star-necklace.html. By using this brilliant Magento SEO tool you can easily create URLs which include all most important and relevant keywords.

Note: Remember to disallow indexing of original URLs by search engine spiders in the robots.txt exclusion file. This ensures that there’s only one version of Magento URL indexed by search engines.

Magento SEO – URL keys / URL identifiers

Magento allows you to specify the URL key (also known as the URL identifier) on every static, content and product category page, see below:

This means that you can choose the keyword you want and add it to the particular page’s URL independently from the Magento page name.

Another great thing is that all Magento URLs included in this path will automatically have their URL structure updated at the same time, For example, you don’t have to worry about URLs within the /necklaces/ path when you change the category’s URL key to /designer-necklaces/ – Magento will automatically update it to include the /designer-necklaces/.

Note: Once you decide to change the URL key, you need to find websites and pages which link to previous versions of those URLs (you can use Google Webmaster Central to identify them) and redirect those old URLs to ne w URLs.

Magento SEO – Force trailing slash to canonical URLs

This Magento SEO feature can be found in System > Configuration > Web > Search Engine Optimisation. It does exactly what it says it will do – it adds a slash at the end of every unique URL on the Magento site.

It’s important from SEO perspective because it tackles a common duplicate content problem when the same page content is presented on two different URLs. Google and other search engines don’t like that as it looks like you’re spamming their index. Also, the PageRank values can be assigned to the duplicate version of the URL, the one you don’t necessarily want to promote.

Magento SEO – URLs – Default Pages

The ‘Default Pages’ Magento SEO feature enables you to re-route all 404 Not Found pages to the content page of your choice, i.e. your homepage. Be careful with this feature though as both Google and your customers sometimes prefer to see a custom-made, attractive 404 page rather than be redirected to the page they didn’t want to see.

Magento SEO – Canonical Link Elements Extension

This is my favourite Magento SEO extension – http://yoast.com/tools/magento/canonical/. It tells the search engine which URL it should have for the current Magento page.

The extension is useful when removing duplicate content issues relating to listings page pagination, when every page, e.g. ‘?p=1’, ‘?p=2’, etc., have the same title and meta description.

This fantastic Magento SEO tool also solves the common problem of many ecommerce platforms whereby one product is placed in many categories. This creates exact copies of the page on several URLs. The canonical link elements SEO extension tells search engines to treat every Magento product page as if it lived in the root category (not classified in any category), e.g. this URL http://www.kabiri.co.uk/jewellery-1/necklaces/masque-pendant-yellow-gold.html has a canonical link element which shortens the URL for search engines – http://www.kabiri.co.uk/masque-pendant-yellow-gold.html.

Read more about Magento Ecommerce Design, SEO Services London and Fashion Ecommerce  Web Design

SEO Myth 1: Exact Match Domain Helps Your Long-term SEO Strategy

I agree that publishing your website on the domain which name includes relevant and generic search terms can help your rankings, in a short term.

However, there is one major long-term trade-off in this approach – branding. Start-up business owners don’t always consider what’s going to happen in 10 or 20 years. As the business grows it’s getting more difficult to differentiate from other websites using exactly the same keywords in their domain name.

SEO Myth 2: PageRank Sculpting Improves PageRank Flow

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm which assigns a numerical value to each page and measures how important and popular the page is. PageRank is often explained using the ‘random surfer’ analogy – the probability that a random surfer clicking on links lands on a particular page.

PageRank flows from one page to another through its links dividing the PageRank value equally among all destination pages.

Image thanks to SEOmoz.org

Search Engine Optimisation specialists used to add a special tag rel=”nofollow” to links if they didn’t want search engines to assign the fraction of PageRank to the destination page. This is called ‘PageRank sculpting’. So if a page links to 10 other pages, each of those pages gets 1/10 of PageRank. But if 5 of those 10 pages have rel=”nofollow” then other 5 pages get 1/5 of PageRank each.

However, in 2009, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that Google doesn’t update the PageRank value if it comes across the rel=”nofollow” attribute. This means, that in our example, 5 pages without nofollow will still only get 1/10 of PageRank. So where’s the rest you ask? I’m afraid that only Google knows that.

SEO Myth 3: PageRank Value In Google Toolbar

PageRank value displayed in Google Toolbar should not be taken too seriously as it is not very accurate and it gets updated only every few months, according to Matt Cutts. Toolbar’s PageRank value is just an estimated representation whilst the real PageRank is a floating point number based on more 200+ factors.

SEO Myth 4: Pay-per-click Helps Rankings In Organic Search Results

No, it never did and I don’t think it ever will. The only way PPC ads can help your rankings is indirectly: user clicks on your PPC ad, likes your website, blogs about it and posts the keyword-rich link to your website contributing to the total number of inbound links. There’s absolutely no direct benefit and no conspiracy theory.

SEO Myth 5: Meta Keywords & Descriptions Help Website Rankings

They did help very long time ago. Due to ‘keyword stuffing’ all major search engines stopped using meta tags as ranking factors, including Google website itself. In fact, inserting a lot of keywords in meta tags can only result in a penalty imposed by the search engine, so watch out and don’t put the whole website in there.

SEO Myth 6: Google Can’t Read Or Understand JavaScript Links

This myth has become one of the hottest SEO discussions over the years. There are hundreds and thousands of posts and forum threads about this. The truth is that Googlebot does understand simple JavaScript snippets, e.g. URL in JavaScript links. However, Google still doesn’t like it and the chance that it doesn’t bother following the link is still much greater. Personally I think it’s unnecessary risk to use JavaScript URLs.

SEO Myth 7: Google Can’t Read Flash Files

Not true any more. Google can now discover and index text content in SWF files. They can also find and follow URLs embedded in Flash files. However, Google does say that they don’t guarantee that they’ll crawl or index all the content. And that’s where the problem still lays. So if you do happen to have the Flash based website, build alternative HTML version.

SEO Myth 8: Dynamic Urls Are Bad For The Site

Not any more. Trimming them to a much understandable format is better and saves a lot of time, however the most commonly used and avoidable parameters are “known” to Google.

SEO Myth 9: Sitelinks Appear Only For Websites With High PageRank

Sitelinks are auto generated for websites with high traffic not high PageRank. There is nothing you can do control them except to block some of the links from appearing using Webmaster Central.

SEO Myth 10: The Meta Description Snippet In Serps Is Always What You Specify In The Code

Not true. Google has changed their algorithm and they will pick up matching lines/phrases from the page content to the search query and display it on the results page.

With the World Cup now less than 2 weeks away it is no surprise that the volume of searches on associated terms has started to increase rapidly. To help visualize the search traffic around the event Hitwise has compiled the graph below which shows how the level of interest has been growing.

1. world cup 2010 (4.98% of all UK Internet searches containing the phrase ‘world cup’)
2. world cup (3.70%)
3. world cup 2010 dates (3.28%)
4. england world cup fixtures (1.77%)
5. world cup fixtures (1.64%)
6. fifa world cup 2010 (1.36%)
7. world cup groups (1.10%)
8. world cup 2010 wall chart (1.10%)
9. fifa world cup (0.74%)
10. world cup fantasy football (0.73%)

Read the full article on the Hitwise Blog