I broke into the top 100 search results in MSN today. I’m now showing up number 85 for Nelson James. No, that’s not the greatest accomplishment in my life, but it’s definitely a start of something good to come. Still no sign of search banter showing up for Nelson James in the other search engines.
It sounds like Chris Payne, corporate vice president of Windows Live Search (formerly known as MSN search), is going to leave Microsoft and start up his own business. I don’t know whether his new business will be in the same industry or not. Regardless, this appears to be another huge blow to Microsoft in the search engine industry. They were already on a downward trend in search engine market share and I don’t think this is going to help much. It’s hard to beleive that Microsoft, a corporation which has virtually monopolized the computer industry, is suffering badly in an area you would expect them to dominate in. It will be interesting to see what happens here.
I am performing a new test: Starting today, I am going to attempt to show up for my name: Nelson James. This may actually be quite difficult since there are 52,300,000 sites that show up for that keyword phrase in Google alone, but I’m up to the task. I’ll be competing against an australian rock band “Nelson James” (of which I was not named after), a professional sailor/writer, a Stanford University Lab, an associate professor of psychology (who has his name entirely backwords), an acclaimed nature photographer, some crappy photo.net page, and finally a website that is temporarily down.
I purposely named this post Nelson James because I have created my blog so that the title of the post is in the URL of the page. Also, if you haven’t noticed, I have made sure that my keyword is the most prominent thing on this page. It’s my title, it’s italicized, and it’s mentioned a few other times. I think that should do the trick.
I am hoping that it will only take a month or so to show up for Nelson James, but you never know. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.
Business Opportunities created an interesting little applet that looks at the value of each link to your blog and then computes your blog’s worth using a link to dollar ratio such as the one AOL-Weblogs uses. Right now, my site is valued at $5,080.86, but with the way things are going, that will change very quickly so to all of those investors out there, get it while it’s cheap! I’ll sell for nothing less than the price it’s listed for (I even want the 86 cents).
Oh, and I don’t think you can find the dollar amount of anything else but a blog in there, unless Google.com is really valued at $0.00 (of course I tried it).
Have you ever wanted to see how many pages of your site the search engines know about? If so and you haven’t heard about the site: command, read on…
Go to any one of the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and type “site:yoursite.com” and hit enter. Make sure you don’t put any spaces between any of the characters there and that search engine will pull up a list of all of the pages of your site it has indexed…supposedly…
On the official Google Webmaster Blog a few days ago, there was a post saying that this site: command doesn’t always pull up a full list of results from the search engines. It sounds like Google is working on this right now and this should be fixed within a couple of weeks so that it shows all of the pages of your site that Google has indexed.
Why Would I Use the Site: Command?
It’s nice to know how many pages of your site have been indexed by the search engines. If you have created new pages in your site, you can use this command to see if and when they get indexed.
Have you ever been to Google maps and seen street names listed incorrectly or not at all? Have you ever typed in a business name or place and Google Maps pointed you to the wrong place? I definitely have, but I never took the time to find out if there was a way I could tell Google about the error. Well, now I know and for all of you out there who would help Google fix these errors if you only knew how, here you go:
These are the map systems that Google uses for their maps. If you report the error here, the next time Google updates their maps, your adjustment will be updated.
If you find other errors, questions, or suggestions for Google maps you can tell them directly here: Google Maps Contact Form.
MSN has a labs website with a bunch of demos and prototypes of tools that can be very insightful and just plain fun to play around with. I know they have had this for a while now, but I have never really looked at any of these tools before, until recently.
One of the tools I have really enjoyed playing around with is the Keyword Forcast which forecasts the impression count and demographic predictions of keywords. Here’s one of the searches I did on SEO to see what the “forecast” is on this industry:
Judging by the forecast, it doesn’t look like I’ll need to be looking for another job anytime soon (at least within the next month of so 
)
There have been a few spottings of Google Adwords ads with italicized titles in the last little while. Google must be beta testing this feature because it definitely isn’t in any of my adwords accounts. Italicized titles doesn’t seem like too bad of an idea. I wonder if italicizing your ad titles will be an option or if there is some type of algorithm that decides for you. I’m guessing it’s the former. This isn’t groundbreaking news, but its always nice to see new innovations that make online marketing even more effective and targeted.
A common quesiton I receive from prospective clients is, “Can I get too many links to my site?” or “Will the search engines penalize me if I get too many links too quickly?”
The answer to the first of these questions is no. You can’t have too many links to your site. The more links you have the better, and the better the links the better off you are. I have heard that you can get penalized by being linked to from bad link farms (here the only purpose of the websites are link building), but I highly doubt that you could be penalized too harshly for such an act because otherwise competitors could get links in these bad link farms for their competition and have them penalized (sounds like a good idea eh? well, don’t do it).
The answer to the second question is yes. You can get too many links too quickly and be penalized for it in all of the major search engines. The real question here then is how many links can you get within a certain period of time without being penalized? I don’t beleive the answer to that question will ever be known because of the potential problems that could cause. I’m also guessing that it wouldn’t be the same amount for every site on the web because there are plenty of major sites that get thousands of links a day and other smaller sites that get zero to a few a month.
My recommendation would be to make it a continual process so that you never have a huge surge of links to your site, but instead feels like natural growth.
So…I made it. My first goal has been accomplished. I’m now showing up for “Utah SEO” in MSN in the first position. My site has officially been up for 44 days now and I have a #1 position for my top keyword. Granted it’s only showing up well in MSN right now, but the general trend seems to be MSN, then Yahoo, and then Google. Yes, I probably do sound a bit prideful about showing up so quickly, and yes, I am a little proud of myself, but again, the MAIN purpose of this post is to show all of you out there that it’s not extremely difficult to show up for the keywords you want to show up for if you follow the simple guidelines of SEO. Granted, “Utah SEO” isn’t searched on as much as “SEO” or “Real Estate” or some other very popular terms, but it reaches a targeted audience and it’s a great beginning for a bigger end goal.
Nelson James is an avid member of the SEO community in Utah. He is passionate about helping his clients develop and increase the internet marketing facet of their businesses.
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