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Being that my blog is fairly new, I don’t expect to rank in google when you search for David Rosenberg just yet. It is fairly understandable being that I don’t have any links yet either. With time that will all change and hopefully I will rank for my full name when you do a search in google. For those of you out there which don’t yet have a personal website or if you are in the same predicament as me there is still hope.

Google launched google profiles, a few weeks ago you can read a detailed over view at search engine land. So I completed my profile, I filled in my information added a photo and  some links to my social media accounts, such as twitter and delicious and 5 minutes later when I did a search for David Rosenberg there I was. Under all the listings with 3 other David Rosenbergs.

Google Profile Results For David Rosenberg

Last Friday google posted (no longer valid) that they are giving away 25 free business cards to the first 10,000 for their google profile. Well I ordered mine and they will look like this.

David Rosenbergs Google Profile Business Card

This is a very easy way to rank for your name so what are you waiting for, go ahead and complete your google profile.

Update: For those that are looking for my profile on google here it is. David Rosenberg ’s Google Profile.

New websites are launched ever day with newbies on yahoo answers asking why when they do a search for their website they don’t show up at all. The typcial response that they get is, add your website to google’s index over here http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl. But this is not the best solution as you can see google clearly states.

We add and update new sites to our index each time we crawl the web, and we invite you to submit your URL here. We do not add all submitted URLs to our index, and we cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if they will appear.

This is actually a newbies best bet, but if you already have a blog or a website and you have the ability to add a link from there to the new site chances are you will get indexed faster. But in most cases newbies don’t have other websites which they can use to add a link to the new site.

There was a period of time that I used to use digital point forums to get my new sites indexed. Being that I was very active and had a lot of fresh posts I would add the links in my signature and within a matter of days my new site would be indexed in google. You have to make sure that the link does not have a rel=”nofollow” tag on it (rel=”nofollow” tells a search engine not to follow the link - more about this some other time.). This again is a luxury that I had being that I had an active account at a forum which allowed me to have links in my signature.

With all of the above options put aside there are still other options available to everyone which will help you get your site get indexed faster. Submit your website to digg.com google bots are practically there all day everyday indexed all the new pages and new links that they find. When their crawlers are there they look at all the new links and crawl them and in turn your new website is now put into  googles index.

What do you do in order to get your sites indexed in google?

When doing on site optimization on a website, one of the fist things to look at are the title tags.  For my friends and family which are new to SEO, and want to learn about SEO I send them to webconfs “15 minutes to seo” tutorial. For each factor that one can use for doing SEO webconfs gives it a score between +3 to - 3. As you can see the first item on the list is title tags with a +3 score.

The title of a page is what tells the search engines what the page is all about. Having great descriptive title tags with the keywords that you are trying to rank for will help a lot for your site to rank better in the SERP.

Even once you have the proper title tags set up on your site you need to make sure that you don’t have the same title tag for different pages. There are many websites that have limited capability with their CMS and by default they have the same title tags for all their pages. This is something that you should really try to avoid at all costs especially for your important pages on your site.

Here is what google says in their SEO Starter Guide (PDF Download) if you have not read it yet go for it.

Create unique title tags for each page - Each of your pages should ideally have a unique
title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
Avoid:
• using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages

Duplicate Title Tags for Newegg.com web pages

There are many big websites that suffer from this problem such as newegg.com, as you can see from the image below

As you can see they have over 38,000 pages with the same title and many of the pages are unique and totally different, such as about us, product reviews, faq’s and a warrenty page. Each of these pages should have a different title.

Fortunately if you have a big website and you want to avoid this problem, google webmaster tools can help. They have a section assigned to help webmasters avoid duplicate content. In the screenshot below you can see the pages that have duplicate titles on my new website buydp.com (still in beta).

Google Webmaster Tools - Duplicate Title Dashboard

If you click on duplicate title tags it will take you to a list which links to all the pages that have duplicate content. This will help you manage and maintain your titles so that you can constantly monitor your pages and avoid the duplicate title issue.

The baseball season has just begun, being that I am a big fan of the New York Yankees, I did a quick search today for yankees in google. Here is what I got.

I am pretty sure that google has been showing sports scores in the search results. But today I noticed two new things that I have not seen in the past.

1. Google is displaying in box score during the game, which means that they are fetching the data from mlb.com, probably via API, although I am not sure.
2. Google added a link “add to iGoogle”, right next to the box score, which takes you to a sports scores gadget.

This comes to no surprise especially after this weekend when we learned that google has been talking to twitter about crawling their site better so that google can display live results from twitter. Google is into freshness and keeping their index as up to date as possible with the latest information. In addition, by keeping the score and the box score in the SERP’s, this allaws the searcher to remain on google’s site a bit longer and maybe click on an ad before leaving to a different website.

Have you seen an “add to iGoogle” link before in the google SERP’s? Is google displaying it anywhere else?

Like I told you in my first post ever, that I will blog about SES NY, which I attended. This is my first time that I went to the SES show althought I have been to the SMX shows a few times. Being that I have been doing SEO for over 3 years, a lot of the things that which were mentioned at the show seemed repetetive and it was more for beginners but there were some good fresh ideas as well and things that I missed that I was able to pick up on. Here is a quick tip that I enjoyed from day one.

The first session that I attened was Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers.

Ray “Catfish” Comstock, had a great idea, that if you have an important  page on your site which has a very high bounce rate with little traffic and you want to figure out how to fix the page, he suggests that you set up a PPC campaign drive traffic to the page and do A/B (Google Website Optimizer) testing until you lower your bounce rate.

Please Note: You don’t need to have an adwords account in order to use Google Website Optimizer.

Go ahead use it, its a great tool for A/B and mulit variant testing.