Welcome to the Dec 2004 issue of the Search Engine Optimizer Newsletter

In this issues you will see from My News, that I've been busy adding new articles and SEO tools to the site.

I have also completed work on a report of over 60 Free online SEO tools that you can use for your own web site optimization. If you haven't downloaded this already you can do so by signing up to continue receiving this new newsletter.

You will see in My News that I have introduced a new autoresponder so it's something of an enticement for you to continue receiving this newsletter to sign-up using the new autoresponder and get the SEO tools report.

• My News
• SEO News & Views
• Resources
• Articles

It has been a busy month for me after something of a long lapse due to an injury. Whilst not fully recovered at least I have felt well enough to catch up on some work.

My site has undergone a complete makeover in terms of visual appearance and I have been doing some further work on site optimization for other keyword phrases. I’m in a particularly competitive area, up against many established sites in search engine optimization.

I don’t know about you, but I get a bit fed up reading about how easy it is to get top rankings and SEO firms that guarantee top rankings. Well you can get almost anything if you have the money to pay for it. I don’t have that sort of money and I don’t suppose you do either.

Doing well in such a highly competitive area is extremely difficult, so I would advise against it with regard to your own SEO for your web site. You simply must, must, down right have to find keyword phrases that don’t have high competition .... and that's often easier said than done. If you don’t, you have a hard tough road ahead of you in getting top rankings, or for that matter any ranking in the top 1000 results.

I’ve also changed over my auto-responder, from Aweber to one I run from my own web space. I have nothing against Aweber they've been a good service, but I prefer to have this function running directly from my site.

I’ve also added a search function to the site and a number of different News Feeds now appear on each page.

Oh! And a Pop-Up for my newsletter. Yes I know Pop-ups can be annoying, but I hope this one isn't - unless someone wants to tell me different ;-) Thanks also to Marcia at Visionquest for pointing out the pop-up doesn't view correctly on a Mac running IE.

Double Google

In mid November Google announced the doubling of their index to 8 billion pages. If you do some keyword research and can compare the results with before the doubling, you can see how many more web sites now exist for the same keywords. Whilst it's not double, it certainly means a lot more competition when it comes to ranking well in Google. As if it wasn't hard enough already :-(

Browser Wars to Desktop Search Wars

It seems the major search engines are now not just intent on cataloging the web but also your PC, as more desktop search tools are launched. I am referring of course to the release of Desktop Search, first by Google back in mid October and more recently by Ask Jeeves, Microsoft and planned for 2005 also Yahoo.

The recent desktop search from Ask Jeeves unlike the offering from Google is a stand alone application that runs on your PC and will search, index and catalog many file types on your PC. It does however require a recommended 256MB or greater RAM to be installed on the PC to run effectively. Like all first releases of any software or technology, they can only get better.

The Google desktop search restricts itself to your C drive. If your anything like me that's not a lot of use as I only use my C drive for the operating system and application system files, my data and applications exist on other drives.

Microsoft recently announced a beta version of its answer to Desktop Search
(It used to be called Windows Explorer - no that's a joke) and Yahoo have one planned for 2005. Like Ask Jeeves the Yahoo desktop search comes as a result of the acquisition of another company who already had the technology.

MSN Search in Beta

Microsoft continues to move faster than expected with their very own MSN Search engine. It's likely they're becoming more satisfied with their results and preparing a full scale swing at challenging Google.

Firefox the new challenger to Internet Explorer ?

By now you may well be aware of the launch of the new browser Firefox V1.0. With over 6 million downloads it is being seen as the next real challenger to Microsoft IE. But of course, that's been said of other browsers in the past. Whilst IE is still king of the browsers, at least by number of users, it's more noticeable that people have stopped upgrading IE quite so much as they used to.

Yet the need to keep Internet Explorer updated has never been greater than it is right now, especially with the number of security vulnerabilities which are announced by Microsoft on a monthly basis. Will Firefox be more secure, only time will tell, but it certainly has a lot of features.

If you're a browser user and a webmaster, you have one extra problem, another browser to check compatibility of your web site against. At the moment I run IE5, IE5.5, IE6, Mozilla/Netscape 6 & 7, Opera and now Firefox 1.0.

Firefox is also more HTML standards compliant so correctly validated web pages should have no problems with it which is one thing you can't say for Netscape or IE versions.

If you don't check your web pages for HTML standards compliance then you should. It's amazing what a good validator will find and it's certainly something worth paying attention to. That's not only for browser viewing, but also search engine bots can have problems spidering highly non-compliant pages.

AdWords Automator

Google is testing a tool that supposedly determines the best keywords for advertisers' pages and automatically creates ads that link to them. The idea is to allow advertisers to indicate the per-click price they're willing to pay to have a specified group of their pages included within the sponsored listings.

I have also been busy adding some online SEO tools:

1. A Broadband speed test checks the bandwidth of your Internet connection.
2. A Meta Tag Optimization tool that creates the 7 most important Meta Tags.
3. A Rotate image javascript page to use as a test reference on SEO tools.
4. An SEO tool to improve search engine rankings by analyzing a web page for keyword density and suggesting words to be used as keywords.
5. The SEO Free Online Tool Report details over 60 free to use online tools for Search Engine Optimization.

I have also added two more articles:

1. Search Engins - Are they worth the ranking effort ?
2. Search Engins - Just what do I have to do to get traffic ?

Misspelling of words by searchers is not to be over looked, quite a lot of people don’t always spell words correctly. It’s worth investigating with your own keyword research.