Microsoft Launches Browse Rank To Compete With Google’s Page Rank

I like seeing Microsoft playing catch up and failing miserably, don’t you?  After all those years of dominance due to their strong-arm tactics, I enjoy seeing the Zune being the butt of jokes while the iPod continues to be a bestseller, and I also loved it when Google came in and started kicking butt on their way to taking over the world.  Except that trying to take over the world makes them more like the new Microsoft.

In the U.S., Google accounted for a massive 70% of all searches, as of July 2008, which is up another 6% from their ranking just a year earlier.  Yahoo is in second place with around 20%, and Microsoft barely squeaked by Ask.com to get third place among search engines with just a bit more than 5%.  They tried to get a bigger slice of the pie before by spending money like crazy, which they have a lot of anyway.  (If only they’d send some over to us here at Cataweb Online S.L.!)

There was their offer of cash rebates to customers who bought stuff from merchants using their “Live Search” search engine.  Then they acquired the search engine Powerset a month later, which uses a different way of comprehending searches by trying to find the full meaning of the phrases typed into it, while Google treats each word individually.  Although its usefulness is limited to searches on Wikipedia, it’s reportedly doing well on the iPhone, ironically.

And then there was their attempt to buy out Yahoo, of course.  It seems that Microsoft’s solution to a problem is to throw money at it, but in Yahoo’s case, even that wasn’t enough.  But now they’ve come up with a new strategy to be number one, and that’s actually developing something new.  In a collaborative endeavor between their own researchers and some scientists from certain Asian universities, they’ve developed BrowseRank to go up against Google’s PageRank.

PageRank is a big part of the search algorithms and tools that Google uses to find the relevant sites for your queries, and it places great weight on the number of links that are connected to a site from other sites.  BrowseRank, on the other hand, is supposed to calculate how often users visit a certain site and for how long they stay there.

Sounds more relevant than counting links, doesn’t it?  Only time will tell though if this really does provide a user with the most reliable results to his search engine queries.  Microsoft likes to banner their opinion that this engine puts the power of searching into the hands of internet users, and not web developers, who are the ones who are best equipped to put your site into the top rankings of a search right now.  This could be an upheaval of SEO techniques in the works, if it turns out Microsoft’s got the superior product.

But then it’s been a long time since they’ve had something like that so maybe Google and current SEO practitioners like us here at Cataweb Online S.L. and others have no reason to worry.

A Little Cataweb Online S.L. Tip To Get Google To Read Your Keywords First

If you didn’t know, Google spiders read your webpage from top left to bottom right, just like a human being would read it.  That’s why SEO practitioners recommend having your main keyword in the first sentence of your website content.  But you might have a problem doing that with some site and blog designs, which have a left hand column containing navigational links.

Well, there’s something you can do about that, and you should, because Google will absolutely read the text content of those links before it reaches the main body of your site, where all the keywords are prominently positioned, if you’ve followed the advice we at Cataweb Online S.L. have given you.  And what you can do is this: create a blank column above your navigational column on the left-hand side.

What happens there is Google will read that blank column first, and seeing that it’s empty, will proceed to the next area to read, which will be the main body of the site, before it goes back to the left side to read the navigational columns!  It’s a quick and easy fix to do, instead of totally redesigning your site, and it will help improve your ranking.  Be aware though, that all these onpage optimizations are mostly tweaks to your SEO, but aren’t as effective as other techniques, most of which you will do offsite.

Still, every little bit counts, as we like to believe at Cataweb Online S.L., and so before going on to mastering other more advanced SEO techniques and theories, you can take care of the basics while building your site.

Step 2 In Optimizing Your Site With Your Chosen Keywords

Continuing some basic SEO lessons from Cataweb Online S.L., once you’ve chosen the keywords that you want your site to rank high in, the next thing to do would be to check out the competition.  For our example we’ve taken “weight loss story”, among others, and when that term is entered in the search engines, the site that came out on top of the rankings at the time was: http://www.runwalkjog.com/weight_loss_success_story.htm, which is a subpage of http://www.runwalkjog.com, meaning it’s not a top level webpage.

When that happens, you could be in luck, because it’s that much easier to outrank a subpage IF you have your keyword in your domain name.  To further snoop around your competition’s page, you can check out their source code, which is done by simply going to the View tab on your browser and choosing the ‘Source’ or ‘Page Source’ option.  Once you’re there, you can check up on a few optimizations to see if your competition is doing them.  If they aren’t, you’re lucky again, because if you do those things, you’ll be on your way to beating them in the rankings.

Some basic site optimizations to consider are:

-Using <h1> header tags in your code and placing their keyword within those tags.
-Using your main keyword in the <title> tags of the website.
-Making sure you’ve bolded, underlined or italicized your keywords in the text of the body of your webpage.
-Using <alt> image tags and placing your keywords within that tag.
-Using your keyword once at the very beginning of the website’s copy, and once at the very end.

Those are some of the things you can check on when looking at your competition’s source code, to see how hard they could be to overtake in the rankings.  And of course now that you know these basic things to do using the keywords you’ve chosen for your site, it’s something you can start doing automatically everytime you make a site, like we do here at Cataweb Online S.L.

Cataweb Online S.L.’s First Step In Optimization: The Keywords

Before you can optimize your site to rank high for a specific search on a search engine, the first thing we at Cataweb Online S.L. do is choose the right keywords.  As an example, let’s say your spankin’ new website is selling a weight loss product.  To optimize it, you’d think you have to make the main keyword “weight loss”, right?  Wrong!  If you start out with a keyword like that to anchor your site’s SEO, you probably won’t get very far up in the rankings.  That’s because there will be bigger and more established sites out there using that same keyword, so the competition will be cutthroat for it.

So the first thing you should do is use a very important online SEO tool, which you can find from various sites, and this is the keyword tool.  I personally use the Good Keywords software, which is freeware and is only around 500kb in size.  Installing it gives you a tool to check up on generic keywords you’re interested in and gives suggestions on other good keywords derived from your original choice.  So if we take your “weight loss” keyword and enter it, what will come out is a list of terms related to it.

In terms of ranking, “weight loss” comes out on top of course, and in our example, it got 1,413,194 searches for the month, based on the Overture engine, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2003.  That’s a lot of searches, and if you want to cross check the results using even just the Google search engine, you’ll see that almost 20,000,000 pages come out for the term “weight loss”.  Those are the pages you’ll be competing against, so it’s best to scroll down the list of keyword options.

Go for more specific terms, like “weight loss story” or “weight loss picture”, which at the time we checked ths out, ranked somewhere in the middle of the Top 100 related keywords for “weight loss”, with maybe 3,000+ searches a day.  Choose your 3 to 4 key phrases from those suggestions and those are the ones you will be using as keywords for your site.  With a lower ranking than the top generic keyword, it should be easier to overtake the top site for those keywords, instead of clawing your way up a list of 20,000,000 entries!  At least that’s what we at Cataweb Online S.L. recommend.

Cataweb Online S.L. Introduction to SEO

Here at Cataweb Online S.L., we know you’ve heard all about how you need to do SEO, ever since you started your internet business or put up an online presence for your company.  And it still confuses you and gives you a headache every time you check it out on the net and look at all those graphs and charts and screencaps of online SEO tools you have to use.  In fact you’re probably thinking what is SEO and why do I need to learn all this stuff?

Well, you don’t really need to learn it, you can always hire an expert.  But you’d better at least have an inkling as to what you’re hiring that expert for, right?  If you didn’t know, SEO means Search Engine Optimization, and in layman’s terms I guess that means arranging stuff on your webpage so that it ranks higher on a search engine, especially for specific search terms or keywords that you want.

So if you’ve got a site for say… comic books, and when you type in ‘comic books’, you find your site on the 63rd search result page (if you can find it at all), then optimizing it means making it appear on the 12th page of the search for example, or as everyone wants, on the 1st page of the search.  But hey, if you’re intentionally on this site, you must know that already.  This basic explanation is really more for those who’ve wandered into Cataweb Online S.L. by accident.