Since Yahoo have recently stopped numbering their search listings I decided it would be a good idea to take the fantastic Number MSN Results and Number Google Results user scripts created by Dave Child, and make them work for Yahoo. To install simply open a Firefox browser, install the Greasemonkey add-on and then click on the link below:
I have recently been working on re-skinning the Simply Lights website which was created (before I got my mits on it) using the osCommerce PHP/MySQL script. osCommerce has been around for years and is one of the most popular shopping cart systems available. It includes thousands of mods/plug-ins which are available to download and install either for free or for a small fee, one of which is Dynamenu which I have installed on the Simply Lights website. The reason I am posting it here is because it took me a good half a day of searching and testing to find a suitable mod that would simply create a DHTML drop down navigation menu and Dynamenu was by far the easiest and best from the selection I downloaded, and the best thing of all, it’s free.
The options allow you to choose the appearance of your navigation menu and includes the options of a horizontal drop-down, a vertical flyout, a tree menu (collapsible folders like windows explorer), a plain (without drop downs) horizontal menu or a plain vertical menu. To install Dynamenu you simply have to upload some files, change a few config settings and drop a line of PHP into the section of your page template where you want the menu to appear. Then it is just a case of restyling the CSS to suit your design.
I’m not a huge fan of osCommerce, I much prefer CubeCart, but once you understand how the files are structured then it becomes fairly easy to modify the PHP/HTML code and CSS.
I’m starting to believe that meta description tags are no longer worth bothering with. Now a lot of SEO people will throwing a small fit reading this but hear me out and I’ll try and win you round.
Previously I have always tried to add relevant meta descriptions to the majority of my websites and projects to help encourage click throughs from listings within search engines. So for example I would add something like “…cheapest deals on mobile phones…” or something along similar lines to catch the eye and make the listing more appealing. But now search engines are starting to pull relevant information from your webpage and use this text as your description and this has a few advantages.
Firstly if you wrote a meta description all about blue widgets and someone is searching for blue widgets and spots your meta description then everything should work perfectly. But if your webpage also sells red widgets and yellow widgets and people search for these terms then there will be no mention of these in your search listing description. But without a meta description tag the search engines will pull some relevant text from your webpage and will show what would be a more targeted description in your listing. This also means that the keywords in your listing description will be bolded making it stand out more.
I don’t believe that meta descriptions have any weight at all in search engine rankings so I doubt there would be any effect to your positions if you remove the tag. The one thing to make this work is that you have to have good content on your webpage which will provide the search engines with enough information to create a listing description from. Of course in SEO, the first thing you advise a client is to get the content right so this bears even more importance if you are to rely on the method above.
So it is something I will be keeping a close eye on in the coming months and deciding whether my sites benefit from removing meta tags and if it is something I will advise future clients about.
The first thing you need is some weight on an automated link building tool such as the Digital Point Co-op Advertising Network or Link Vault. You can purchase the weight from other users through the respected website forums.
Then you need to be signed up to an affiliate program that creates a landing page on the merchants site with your own affiliate id in the URL (rather than going through a network redirect link), for example Amazon or Mobiles4Everyone.
Then you look at which are the latest products and find the landing page with your affiliate id, for example:
Cheap Nokia N81 on Mobiles4Everyone with my affiliate id
The reason I suggest the latest products is because you will have more chance of ranking for these rather than something that has been around for a long time and has lots of competing webpages.
Then you point your automated weight (Link Vault, Digi Point) at the chosen link targeting the search terms that are relative to that page, eg. if you look at the page <title> tag you on the above example you will notice that it is “Cheap Nokia N81 8GB deals” so I would target “Cheap Nokia N81 8GB”, “Nokia N81 8GB deals” and “Cheap Nokia N81”. It is important that you target search phrases that are within the titles or page otherwise Google will filter out the pages thinking that you are just Google Bombing
Then just give it a month or so and keep a check on the targeted search terms. The advantage of pointing direct to the merchant’s domain is that you will benefit from their website age and authority within the search engines, so you will have more chance of the webpage ranking through this method than you would if you were using a new website. And what you will find is that Google will see your page as the original due to the incoming links and will prevent the websites own page without your affiliate id from ranking.
YES. Though it is probably not a single filter it is more likely to be a combination of aging filters that prevent new websites from instantly ranking for competitive search terms. I know this because I have experienced it with several websites. This is also the reason why big SEO firms tend to shy away from optimising websites that are less than a year old. Let me explain a couple of my experiences.
The first time I experienced it was when I was building reciprocal links for Glass Block Outlet back in 2004. When I did an allinanchor: search in Google for the search terms I had been targeting (“Glass Blocks”, “Glass Block”, “Glass Bricks”, “Glass Brick”) the website was ranking top 10 but in the real search results I was 300+. Once the site reached about 9-10 months old it jumped straight into the top 10. Nothing had changed.
The AffiliStore website was created back in December 2006 and each of the scripts that visitors downloaded and created websites with had footer links targeting the AffiliStore website with either the brand term “AffiliStore” or the more competitive term “Affiliate Marketing”. Obviously there was no problem ranking for “AffiliStore” as no one else was really targeting that search term (apart from a few affiliates who blogged about the scripts) but, as with Glass Block Outlet, the site was ranking top 15 for “allinanchor:Affiliate Marketing” but 300+ in the real search results. This time there was thousands of one way incoming links which also included some nice PR4-5 links from popular affiliate related blogs but again it took until November 2007 for the site to jump from 300+ to top 15 in Google for “Affiliate Marketing”.
Now it seems to me that there is an aging filter which says “If this site is less than 6-12 months old and has incoming links targeting competitive search terms, then dump it down to 300+ in the rankings.” I also know that the longer an incoming link is in place the more it will benefit your website. I’ve heard (but not experienced) that getting a link from an authoritative website, for example the BBC, with your anchor text targeting the competitive term will kick your site out of this sandbox effect. This would make sense as Google is about providing users with the best experience so if a website such as the BBC is recommending your website for a search term then you must be providing a good resource.
Another way of getting around the sandbox effect with a new domain is to use a domain name that contains the exact search terms. So for example if I had just bought affiliatemarketing.co.uk I would have a lot less hassle trying to rank my site for “Affiliate Marketing” through building links. But these domain names are very hard to come by as they have been snapped up years ago.
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