Joe Hayes {dot} Org

Where have I been? Well, extremely busy with local projects and folks breathing down my neck to get things done. Eh, good problem to have I guess. Been so busy actually I just now got a chance to read through some of my favorite blogs, namely Matt Cutts (head of the spam team at Google) - and I came accross a post late last month about Google Trends.

SEO, an acronym for one of the most misunderstood concepts for a webmaster. Optimizing your websites for search engines isn’t voodoo, in fact 90% of it is basic stuff almost anyone can do without any prior experience. While some of the more advanced methods like link building and link baiting deserve an article all to themselves, the stuff covered here get to the core of what we’re after - to  get your pages in the search indexes and have them rank for the key terms you deserve.

Simply put, a meta tag is information located between your head tags giving search engines more information about your web page. This isn’t viewable to a websurfer, however most web pages have at least some meta information and this can be seen by viewing a pages source code (right click, view source with internet explorer). When search engine bots (sometimes called spiders) come to your website, they use this meta information to help build their index of your web page. Typically, meta data looks like this:

AOL rrecently eleased search data gathered from 650,000 of their customers, causing an uproar about privacy concerns and dazzling webmasters. The 20 million search queries, listed with an anonymous number correlating to which user made the search, if and what result they clicked on, and what rank that result was on the page, were made available yesterday and then taken down a few hours later. Too late though, as dozens of mirrors have popped up hosting downloads of this huge 500ish MB file.