For those of you who are not yet familiar with Cuil, it is the latest contender for the Google throne. Cuil is a new search engine developed by a team of ex-Google personnel. (more…)

Shopping carts are an essential part of an e-commerce site. But the way that many shopping carts are designed can be very detrimental to search engine rankings. That’s because expertise with search engines is not one of the skills possessed by many designers and developers. A designer’s job is to create an inviting, user-friendly site. A developer adds the database and interactive capabilities. Working with search engines is a separate art and science. The following are features that are important if you wish to see your product pages have a reasonable chance of ranking well with search engines. (more…)

JavaScript is commonly used to provide interactive features on Web site, such as rollover effects, drop down menus and creative animations. But the improper use of JavaScript can drive potential customers away and hinder search engine rankings. Learn what you need to know to avoid JavaScript-related problems. If you don’t, you may find that your site will have numerous problems retaining users and and picking up free search engine listing. (more…)

Google provides a wide range of useful tools that are worthy of investigation. Every web site owner should be aware of these links. Some tools, such as Google’s Webmaster Tools, require registration. If you learn to use these tools, you will gain useful insight into how Google views your web sites. The following is a list of links that provide valuable tools, insight and information to help you utilize Google more effectively. (more…)

Good rankings in search engines depend upon many factors, but one of the most important is having good informational content on a Web page with a good mix of the targeted keyword phrases. The targeted keyword phrases set the keyword theme for a Web page. The content and several other page elements reinforce the theme for the page and proper reinforcement typically leads to higher search engine rankings. (more…)

If you find that your traffic from Google is falling off precipitously, pages in your web site may be getting moved in to Google’s supplemental result index. Google’s Supplemental Results is a secondary database that Google uses to park pages that it feels may not meet its standards. These pages rarely–if ever–show up in search results. There is a wide range of reasons that Google uses to weed out individual pages that it does not deem to be worthy of placement on its search results pages. (more…)

MSN is the number three search engine and trails a long way behind Google and Yahoo. Nonetheless, it can drive a substantial amount of traffic to your web site and should not be ignored. The following links provide valuable tools, insight and information to help you utilize MSN more effectively. (more…)

This article describes a search engine optimization technique known as cloaking. While there are some legitimate uses for this technique, search engines consider cloaking to be an unethical practice, because the technique can be used to artificially boost a site’s rankings in search engines. The use of cloaking, or a technique that is mistaken for cloaking, will likely get a site banned (completely removed) from a search engine database if the technique is detected. (more…)

Yahoo is the number two search engine. While Google continues to dominate and drives most of the traffic on the Internet, Yahoo is preferred by many users. The following links provide tips, marketing tools and useful information that can help a site owner utilize Yahoo’s search services more effectively. (more…)

The robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion file, is probably the best way to protect specific files and directories from being indexed by search engines. Why would you want to do this? To prevent certain Web pages, images or other Web objects from being added to a search engine’s database. (more…)