2005 January - MJS Blog

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Wednesday, January 26, 2005
The Advantage of Google’s Advanced Search

I met with a gentleman today who was telling me he was dissatisfied with his web searches – he was coming up empty.

I recently went looking on eWeek’s website for a privacy article I read earlier in their magazine. My searches kept coming up empty as well. eWeek’s own search wasn’t working at the time or something. (It’s working now). Determined to find this article, I remembered you can search someone else’s website using Google. I searched from Google and I found the article.

Which leads me to the point of this post.

If you’re not getting the search results you want, maybe you’re not utilizing Google (and other search engines) to its fullest.

Take a look at Google’s Advanced Search features.

Search someone else’s website - Typing in “eWeek.com” under “Domain” and entering in my keywords under “Find Results”, Google was able to find the article.
Exclude words from your search - Add a minus (-) sign before words you don’t want in your search. I use this feature when I see many duplicate results after a search. By eliminating these duplicates you can increase your chances of finding what you want.
Up to date searches - A lot of times when I want to search for the latest news or recent web articles, I’ll search for web pages updated in the last “3 Months” under “Date”.

Google has made searching cool and popular. They get it right most of the time, but sometimes Google needs some help from us. Google can only produce the results you tell it. You’ve heard the saying, “You get what you put into it”.

Here are some more ways to utilize Google’s Advanced Search.

Mike Swartz says, “Check it out.”

Posted by: Michael Swartz at 11:10 pm

Comments: None | Filed under: Web General

Monday, January 24, 2005
Don’t Stop Using Stop Words

There are still some SEO (search engine optimization) myths out there. One is to not include “stop words” in your keyword optimization strategy. From our own research this can’t be farther from the truth.

Stop words…what’s that? Stop words are words that are very common in our language: a, is, to, how, the. When you do a search on Google, Google says they don’t include stop words in the search results – too common (If you add quotation marks to your words/phrases, then Google will include stop words in your results).

Our Own Research Indicates to Include Stop Words

Ask Jeeves includes them; displaying them in bold. Yahoo definitely pays attention to most stop words. It doesn’t look like MSN does though. The simplest test is to add stop words to your copy, perform a search with them - and without them - and see where your page is positioned in the results.

In essence, don’t think that not including stop words will get you higher. If it’s basic to our common speak, it’s good to keep them in. Remember, design websites for humans first, search engines second. We all use stop words when speaking or writing, so why wouldn’t the search engines.

Though Google may not index stop words (without quotes), other search engines do. And although Google may be #1 and the most popular, you cannot afford to leave the other engines out of your optimization campaign.

Mike Swartz says, “Check it out.”

Posted by: Michael Swartz at 11:36 am

Comments: None | Filed under: SEO

Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Keep in Shape, Stay Up to Date

Keeping up with technology is a job in itself. Technology changes so rapidly, you’d be out of the loop in a manner of minutes if you didn’t keep up on the latest news. I wanted to share with you some of the magazine publications I read on a regular basis.

eWeek – One of the best resources for up-to-date technology news. Recently I read in eWeek that Toshiba was recalling memory chips on some laptops. Turned out it was one I owned. I responded immediately to Toshiba and received my new chip all thanks to eWeek.

VARBusiness – VARBusiness is all about working in vertical markets - a very lucrative strategy. Their articles are very engaging. I just read a fantastic article on Apple’s deceptive tactics towards their own resellers. I mostly enjoy the “Systems Building” section in the back sponsored by TechBuilder.org.

Information Week – My favorite is the “News Scan” section. They provide brief tech news stories - just enough info to understand what’s going on without all the extra stuff.

Maximum PC – This magazine is great for the ultimate PC enthusiast. Every article, review, etc. is cutting edge. MaxPC never gives you the same ‘ol articles on tweaking Windows like some other PC Mags do. One of my favorite articles was how to create an HTML active desktop.

These magazines are just a few I subscribe to and try to read on a regular basis. You know the old saying, “Knowing is half the battle”.

Mike Swartz says, “Check it out!”

Posted by: Michael Swartz at 10:14 pm

Comments: None | Filed under: Uncategorized

Friday, January 7, 2005
Don’t Ask Jeeves, He Doesn’t Know

Happy New Year!

I just did a search on Ask Jeeves to test a customer’s keyword/website placement results compared to Yahoo’s. Ask Jeeves’ results show a PDF file we removed from the customer’s website months ago.

Clicking on the search result I get the following error: “Not Found - The requested URL /pdf/HOW_TO_WRITE.pdf was not found on this server.” Why bother telling me this? This error or link to the error should never show up in the search results. Ask Jeeves is not being very helpful if they’re giving me dead links.

Ask Jeeves Gives Inaccurate Results

The only reason why Ask Jeeves still has this file indexed is because they’ve failed to re-index our customer’s website. What’s the point of using a search engine, when it fails to give accurate results? Ask Jeeves has got some work to do before I rely on their searches.

It’s important for a search engine to provide quality results. It’s their job. Broken links don’t fall into this category. There’s a reason why Google is #1.

Note: Obviously no two search engines are alike, so here are a couple of websites that allow you to compare your search results from various search engines:

- Thumbshots Ranking Tool

- Jux2

Mike Swartz says, “Check it out!”

Posted by: Michael Swartz at 2:27 pm

Comments: None | Filed under: SEO