Search Enginuity

Google has released a very useful SEO beginners guide (hat tip) entitled: Making the Most of Your Content: A Publisher’s Guide To The Web. The guide doesn’t provide any earth shattering insight (it’s for beginners) but it is a useful tool to back up your recommendations to clients/constituents. It should also help you frame your 60 second SEO basics pitch to SEO newbies.

Here’s a rundown of what’s in the guide (the index):

• A brief overview of web search
• What’s new in Google web search?
• Can Google find your site?
• Can Google index your site?
• Does your site have unique and useful content?
• Increasing visibility: best practices
• Webmaster Central
• FAQ’s
• Glossary

And here are some highlights:

1. A nice visual of Google’s process:

2. A short and concise summary of useful and unique content that’s properly optimized.

“Once the site is discoverable and indexable, the final question to ask is whether the content of the web pages is unique and useful.

First look at your text as a whole. Are your title and text links descriptive? Does your copy flow naturally and in a clear and intuitive manner?

Just as a chapter in a book is organized around specific areas and themes, so each web page should be focused on a specific area or topic. Keywords and phrases emerge naturally from this type of copy, and users are far more likely to stay on a web page that provides relevant content and links.

Make sure, however, that the phrases you write include the phrases that visitors will likely search for. For instance, if your site is for an MG enthusiast club, make sure the words ‘MG’ and ‘cars’ actually appear in the copy, rather than only terms like ‘British automobiles’.” (copyright Google, Inc.)

3. Google’s best practice recommendations:

What to do:

1. Create relevant, eye-catching content…
2. Involve users…
3. Monitor your site…
4. Aim for high-quality inbound links…
5. Provide clear text links…

What to avoid:

1. Don’t fill your page with lists of keywords
2. Don’t attempt to ‘cloak’ pages…
3. Don’t put up ‘crawler only’ pages…
4. Don’t use images to display important names, content or links…
5. Don’t create multiple copies of a page under different URLs with the intent of misleading search engines.

There are a couple of additional goodies in the guide. Give it a read.

MSNBC’s red tape chronicles blog written by Bob Sullivan has an interesting piece on how Google search engine results pages and their ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ feature are being used by email spammers.

“With traditional spam finally losing traction among e-mail users, spammers have stepped up their pace of innovation. Last year, they adopted new techniques like image spam, .pdf spam and even audio spam. These disappeared as quickly as they came. But starting in January, spammers began flooding inboxes with a new kind of spam that uses a much simpler form of deception. In the body of these e-mails, recipients see what looks like a link to Google search results — and in fact, that’s what it is. There’s trouble, however, on the other side of that link.

The attack combines two tactics. First, spammers game Google so the Web site they want recipients to visit ranks at the top of the search engine results. Second, they alter the URL pasted in e-mails so users who click on the link go directly to the top result via Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” feature – bypassing a stop at Google’s Web site.”

Apparently using a legitimate Google link bypasses spam and phishing filters. Google, always on top of their game, said they’re already working on stopping this.

“A Google spokeswoman who asked not to be named said the company has seen “I’m Feeling Lucky” attacks, but added that help is on the way.

“Google began deploying a fix that should block most of these ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ redirects, and we will work to reduce such issues in the future,” she wrote in an e-mail.”

Full story, New Cyber Trick: Search Engine Spam.