Is Seo For All Search Engines?

Is it different to optimize a website for google than for yahoo? Or is it the same concept that applies?
I wonder if they have similar algorithms

Critique Needed

Hi Everyone,

I have two websites that have been posted for around five years. I have a degree in graphic design so I am fairly happy with the overall look and feel of my sites - However, I am not satisfied with my search engine rankings.

I would appreciate any feedback to improve my sites’ optimization - Thanks in advance for any help!

Here are the two addresses:

www.mframing.com
www.mattsart.com

Matt
Masterpiece Framing

Google QuickSand: US bias and other fun findings while drowning in sand

It admittedly has been a while since I have tried to rank a brand new domain from scratch so fortunately the “Google Sandbox” concept hasn’t crossed my mind in a long time.  Hell it’s even got its own Wikipedia entry these days.  Well I can report that the sandbox effects are alive and well but there are some things that are new to me that I wanted to report on to get your thoughts on your experience.  What I have noticed:

There doesn’t seem to be the same filter or sandbox effects in non US Google engines.  For example Google.de or Google.es rank my new domain on page one in their results but no where to be found in the top 500 on Google.com

The filter can be on a page by page level and not at a domain level. I have sub pages within the site that ARE ranking to the top for terms in Google but these same DO have quality direct inbound links into them.  So it seems that on a page by page level you can climb out of the sand while that doesn’t mean it will lift your entire site from the filter.

The sandbox is exposed on “future” datacenter checks. Again could be late to the party here but performing a search on “future” datacenters on tools like DCcheck.com will show your sandboxed page ranking “where it should rank” without the filter.  Which is encouraging and frustrating at the same time!

So the big question is how does a site climb completely out of the sandbox?  Here is a short list:

• Build quality links. The obvious one, the more quality links you build the better shot you have at going out.  The caveat being, you may need to build these quality links to a number of pages including your homepage to free it.
• Time. After you build the links you may just need time for them “to bake”.
• Move out of the US. Got to consider this right?  Less competition in the SERPS, no Sandbox.

What are you seeing and what tips would you add for folks looking to dig out?

Keyword Placement Importance

Does Google give more weight to keywords that show up early (on the top of the webpage) compared to keywords that may be located in the middle or at the bottom of a page? I was wondering if it’s important to be as keyword rich as early as possible when targeting google search engines or doesn’t it matter…..Thank you.

Phil…

Can’t Crack Google?

I have been working at SEO for over 6 months now and have good results in Yahoo and MSN ranking on the first page for many of my important keywords, but I still don’t even show up in Google results at all — its like we don’t exist for Google! Does anyone have any insight as to why this might be the case? We must be doing something right to get the improved rankings on other search engines, I think, but I just can’t figure out what we need to do to get into Googles results (we have a Google page rank of 3). Any advice?

Laura

Problem In Page Indexing In Google

We have a website with Good Credits. We have recently added 300 new pages in the website 15 days back, but these pages are not Yet crawled by Google.

Is there any way to get them indexed faster?

We have already created sitemap.xml and submitted it in Google Webmaster 7 days back.

Please suggest a better solution.

Thinking Outside The Box… What If Competitor Copies?

I’m looking at starting a new site in my niche.
I have some ideas that haven’t been used before, which I think I can take advantage of.
Now, I’m using these ideas on a new site, which will obviously have little traffic, and take time to build.
Now what if competitor(who is on top of the niche) sees these ideas, and uses them on his own site. With all his traffic and exposure, he’ll basically be credited for the ideas.
How do you avoid that?

Using “&” In <title>

Is it okay or not to use & in a title tag?
Instead of and??

Or should I just say and??

Was also wondering impact for keywords…in searches…read somewhere & is good for keywords but idk.

Help With Keywords?

Hello all–

Just needing a little help finding some good keyword search tools and/or advice….

Whatever you can provide would be amazing!

Thank you.

Tracking Referrer Conversions

I have the feeling I’m missing something simple but I can’t seem to figure out how to track a conversion from a referring site. I think we have all the data we need in Google Analytics:

The referring site URL
The “goal” page which is the receipt page

So, if a site comes from the referring URL and generates a receipt page - the goal is achieved. All I need to track is the number of goals per referrer.

Thanks!