Keep tabs on your competition’s online advertising budget with SpyFu

Searchme is a graphical page screenshot search engine.   You flip through screenshots of websites like your browsing your iTunes library.   The idea is interesting.

Searchme Visual Search - Beta - rev. 2.0.1

There’s no easier way to add your site to Google index than using Google Webmaster tools.

The steps are simple: You create an account (if you don’t have one), add your site and verify it.

There are 2 ways to verify the site, you can either add a meta tag with one code that the tool will provide you or you can create a .html file with the code.

Once your site is verified, you will access usuable information such as:

• If your site is indexed (surprising enough, I had one that wasn’t)
• How Google webcrawler see your site
• Adding a site map only for helping the web crawlers (more known as Google bot)
• Keywords and phrases most searched
• Manage how fast the web crawler will search for your site (I’m still trying to understand how this works and why should affect your index position)
• Add tabs on your iGoogle with all information for each site you manage
• some other stuff that might be useful

I do recommend to use Google Analytics and AdWords together with the info from the webmaster tools to get more traffic to your site.

I have just got this white paper and it describes how some SEO techniques can actually turn your strategy against you.

The best of this white paper is that the article has a video.

Here’s the video link: 12 SEO Campaign Killers Video

Yes a cheat sheet for search optimization.

I was looking for search optimization tips when I have came around this PDF and it give the basic idea of what you need to take care about when optimizing your site for search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc.

This cheat sheet was created by the SEOmoz.org and it is a very good website to check on some ideas.

Enough talking. Just click here to download the pdf .

Every developer knows that Apache rewrites rules to break down urls with lot’s of query strings are one of the most efficient ways to  optimize your site  for search engines.

Recently I have to create a series or rules to work with a extensive directory list in one site and here are some of the things that you can use when creating your rules.

1. If you are working with a directory listing or if you will use an address as part of the search on the query string, then, when creating the url create in a ordered manner way, but at the title, write it in back order way.

Think like this:  When you search for a product or service on a search engine you will probably do service + city + state, right!? Then writing the title with service, city and state will increase the chances that you have to appear on the first pages on the search engine results.

2. When creating the rules be sure to put them in a logic order way. Apache will not understand too similar rules pointing to different pages if one contains less requirements than the second.

Consider this:

1st. RewriteRule ^directory/([A-Za-z+]+)/([A-Za-z]+)/([A-Za-z+].+)/?$ /list.php?&c=$1&s=$2&v=$3 [NC]

2nd. RewriteRule ^directory/([A-Za-z+]+)/c/([A-Za-z+].+)/user/([A-Za-z+,.]+)/([0-9]+)/?$ /detail.php?&c=$1&v=$2&name=$3&id=$4 [NC]

With this disposition, apache will not understand the second rule, even knowing that the rule is there, because the first rule requirements will became true before the second, but if you invert the rules, apache will understand both, since the second rule has more requirements than the first and not all the requirements where matched.

3. Try to create a rule that is a catch all for something that you are not expecting. This will avoid the user and search engine view something that is not supposed to be there.

SEO Browser is an interesting tool to help you hone your SEO strategy.   The tool shows you the links and text only on your pages.

Free SEO Software Tool & Text Browser, Search Engine Optimization Tools - SEO Browser

Michael Martinez lists 25 SEO tips and among them are the 2 most successful (easy money, low hanging fruit) changes that I’ve seen generating results.  These two:

• Stop using keywords in your URLs.
• Stop using keywords in your titles.

http://seo-theory.com/wordpress/2007/10/16/20-hard-core-seo-tips/

He goes on to explain that if your SEO strategy is limited to these 2 practices, it is not a strategy and I have to admit that this has been the core of my strategy.