Blog Category: Search Engines (SEO)
Google will change its results based on what you have clicked on, and how many times you have clicked, especially if you are logged in to Gmail or another Google service while searching Google.
Google is trying to help you find the results you want, or at least what it thinks you want. Fine for general searching, unless you are checking your website results!
To get un-biased results, you need to turn off cookies in your browser, and logout of Gmail. As this is probably quite inconvenient, I suggest using a second browser such as Opera (free, www.opera.com) and make sure it removes all cookies when closing the browser.
This will give you clean, un-biased results in Google for checking your website position.
Posted in Search Engines (SEO), Tips & Resources on 4 Apr '10, 02:14pm | No Comments
The poor old meta description tag, mis-understood, abused and then abandoned…. is it still useful on your website?
Every page on your website should have a meta description, it looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”Product Design + Development Katapult Design” />
Although its invisible to your website visitors, the meta description tag is used by Google (when it can’t find anything better) to describe your website in its search results.
Here’s the meta description from my website shown in Google:
(its the text underneath the blue link)
The meta description is not used by Google to rank your website anymore because it was so widely abused in the past.
If the meta description is not used to rank my website, does is matter?
Having a good meta description in Google is really useful because it helps visitors decide whether to visit your website or not.
Your website might be doing really well in Google’s results, even a #1, that’s half the battle, the other half is convincing people to click on your link, and not the #2 result.
You can do this by being relevant, make your meta title (the big blue link) and meta description (underneath it) useful to the visitor.
Because its not used to rank your website, it doesn’t need to have any keywords in it… as long as it provides good information describing the page, you can increase visitors to your website simply by changing this one simple thing.
Posted in Search Engines (SEO), Tips & Resources on 7 Jul '09, 03:19pm | No Comments
Wolfram|Alpha the newest search engine gives facts, not links to websites (like Google) or opinions (like Wikipedia).
Is this useful? Yes, I can think of a few cases were is could be extremely useful.
If you want to know the population of Europe for an assignment, the facts that Wolfram|Alpha provides are proven, rather than biased facts from Google results, or even completely wrong ‘facts’ from wikipedia.
Here’s a few examples:
- Population of Europe (591 million), Australia (20.7 million) or even our lovely Byron Bay(6,764 people)
- GDP of USA ($13.78 trillion) or China ($3.4 trillion). USA’s GDP is still 6 times bigger than China’s!
There are also loads of mathematical calculations, if you are into that sort of thing ; )
Will Wolfram|Alpha be bigger than Google?
Probably not, but that’s not the point. Nor will it compete with Wikipedia.
Wolfram|Alpha will sit nicely alongside both Google and Wikipedia, as each have a different role.
Wolfram|Alpha gives facts, not opinion, or links millions of websites (each with a different opinion or varying degrees of truth).
“Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.”
- from Wolfram|Alpha About page
Posted in Search Engines (SEO), Tips & Resources on 5 May '09, 02:45pm | No Comments
Google will change its results based on what you have clicked on, and how many times you have clicked, especially if you are logged in to Gmail or another Google service while searching Google.