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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?

As I write this post, twitter is down. It has not been down for a long, long, long time. When twitter first started out it used to go down twice a week or more for long periods of time. Do you remember the twitter fail whale?

Twitter Fail Whale

Currently on their website they state that they should be up in an hour or so.

Twitter is currently down for unscheduled maintenance.

We expect to be back in about an hour. Thanks for your patience.

If twitter wants to grow up one day and start monetizing and maybe become a real search engine, with an ad platform they better figure out how to keep their website up at all times, google and yahoo don’t seem to have that problem.

Update: Twitter is back up.

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.

I am sure you know this already, the Obama’s installed a playground in the WhiteHouse lawn on March, 4, 2009. Here is an image of a plaque which was put on the play system.

White House Playground Plaque

Image credits to blog.alignex.com:

A few days after the playground was installed in the White House lawn, The National Recreation and Park Association contacted the White House and advised them to implement playground safety and suggested that they install rubber mulch for the playground surface. The White House in turn contacted Rubberecycle.com to have them install the rubber mulch. Below you can see the before and after pictures of the playground with and without the rubber mulch.

Being that they are one of my clients, I wanted to take advantage of the moment and do some PR for them. I contacted Janet Thaeler aka newspapergrl, to write a press release for Rubberecycle.  You can read the press release about the rubber mulch on prweb.com.

I have used Janet’s service many times in the past, she does some great online PR, and I was very please with the success that we received from the latest press release.

As promised here are the playground before and after pics.

White House Playground Before

White House Playground After

Image credits to www.buzzfeed.com and

rubbermulch on flickr.com

Update April 2 2009 1:17 PM:

Janet did a guest post on tinychoices.com

Shoemoney just posted on his website that he is moving to Portland at the beginning of May this year. He states that his parent company ShoeMoney Capital, INC has been bought by the hanso foundation. Pretty interesting this is what wikipedia has to say about the foundation.

The Hanso Foundation is a fictional foundation in the Lost television series. It was formed by arms purveyor Alvar Hanso, who turned his attention from “keeping the world safe through the development of sophisticated weapons systems” to focus instead on the development of new technologies to “create a brighter future for all humanity.

You can see in the video that he mentions that he will be going to work via submarine to the Island, and at the end as the cameras zooms out to get more view you can see Shoe wearing a Dharma Jump suit. As the video comes to an end you can hear the lost music in the backround.

By taking a look at the commenst you can see that many people really believe that Jeremy would actually sell his company and go move to Portland and travel to work on an island via submarine. I tried posting a comment on the blog but I guess it was moderated and filtered out, so that no one else can see that this is an April fools trick.

Shoe is a big fan of april fools day and you can check out last years april fools day trick as well.

I sent shoemoney a tweet right after I read the post, but still did not hear back from him.

There were many clues that gave it away, did you fall for it or did you figure out that it was all a trick? Let me know how you figured out that the rumer is a hoax?