Marko @ X10 - A web producer blog

Google announced and update for AdSense for Search that enables you to host the search results directly on your own pages, unlike before, where you were redirected to a Google domain.

Publishers using AdSense for search now have the option to open search results within their own websites. By adding an additional set of search results code to your page, you can display Google search results framed within your own site. This new option will help you blend AdSense for search into your site even further. You'll also have the added advantage of keeping users on your site while still offering them the useful information available through Google search.

How do I implement Adsense for search results on my own page?

Before you can implement AdSense for search results within your own site, be sure to create the page where the search results will be displayed. If your web host or site application does not offer you the ability to create an separate URL for your search results -- for example, if you're using Blogger -- you will not be able to implement your search results within your page.

Once you've created the page where search results will be displayed, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your account at https://www.google.com/adsense.
2. Visit the AdSense Setup tab
3. Choose AdSense for search as the product.
4. During the first step of the guided setup, scroll down to the More options section and click the radio button marked Open results within my own site
5. Enter the URL of the page you've created in which you'd like search results to appear. You must create this page yourself; it will not be created or displayed automatically on the URL you enter. If you're familiar with relative URLs, you're welcome to enter one instead of the full URL.

6. Continue to choose any other options for your search box and results.
7. Copy the code generated in the Your search box code box and paste it into the HTML source of the page where you'd like to display the search box.
8. Copy the code generated in the Your search results codebox and paste it into the HTML source of the page on which you'd like to display the search results.
9. Save your webpages

Note: Any AdSense for search settings or options that you've selected, including Competitive Ad Filters and site-flavored search, will continue to work with search results in an IFRAME.

Posted by MarkoW at 09:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Matt Cutts, the Google search engine guru, started publishing search engine optimization (SEO) tips on Google Video.
Especially the Google SEO myths I found very interesting!

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-answers-on-google-video/

Posted by MarkoW at 03:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is a calender listing important SEO events. Currently it lists events to the end of 2006. Please mail me or comment if you have suggestions.

Posted by MarkoW at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, I though a bit more about this whole Google sitemap subject. Two things bugged me about the script I posted yesterday.

A: The script would always show the original creation date as the date of last modification, regardless of comments. Commments often hold important information - except when my graphical merchandiser makes them - , that Google should know about.

B: There was no way to assign Priorities. Some very old post would be just as important as the new index post.

The updated code below changes this. Comments aren't neglected anymore. Also, the blog front page gets scanned daily and has the highest priority(1.0). Then follow the ten most recent entries with a priority of 0.9, then the last "9999" posts with a priority of 0.5.

Again, simply build a new index template and copy and paste the below code. Save it as your-sitemap.xml. To let Google know about it open your browser and enter:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= + location of your sitemap

If you have a Google account you may use it to track your sitemap.

Have fun!


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">



<url>

<loc><$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></loc>

<priority>1.0</priority>

<MTEntries lastn="1">

<lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></lastmod>

</MTEntries>

<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

</url>



<MTEntries lastn="10">

<url>

<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>

<lastmod><MTIfNonZero tag="MTEntryCommentCount"><MTComments lastn="1"><$MTCommentDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTComments><MTElse><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTElse></MTIfNonZero>

</lastmod>

<priority>0.9</priority>

<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

</url>

</MTEntries>



<MTEntries lastn="10" offset="10">

<url>

<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>

<lastmod><MTIfNonZero tag="MTEntryCommentCount"><MTComments lastn="1"><$MTCommentDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTComments><MTElse><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTElse></MTIfNonZero>

</lastmod>

<priority>0.8</priority>

<changefreq>daily</changefreq>

</url>

</MTEntries>



<MTEntries lastn="9999" offset="20">

<url>

<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>

<lastmod><MTIfNonZero tag="MTEntryCommentCount"><MTComments lastn="1"><$MTCommentDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTComments><MTElse><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"$></MTElse></MTIfNonZero>

</lastmod>

<priority>0.5</priority>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

</url>

</MTEntries>



</urlset>


Posted by MarkoW at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I have been showing off my new X10 blog to lots of friends, but today I made the mistake to show it to Jan, who is a good friend and former colleague, that now works in Dublin for Hewlett Packard.

Jan is what I call a typical German (no, he does NOT drink his beer warm, no German I know does! ) What is very true for him though was best said by my american brother in law once, he said:

"In Germany praise is the absence of criticism."

That's Jan! I could hear his brain working, trying to find the flaw in my blog. He couldn't critize the coding much, since I use a software, and the contents are a question of personal preference. Then it made "click" in his brain, he said: "How do you get Google to crawl all those generated pages?"

Our first thought was of course Google's Sitemaps, but how would that work without submitting a seperately hosted XML file somewhere, which would have to be updated everytime you create a new blog entry.

Content that he found a flaw, we exchanged a few more words and I went back to my Saturday morning. His comment left me no peace though, I started going through my blog templates. An hour later I called Jan again, because I had found the solution. I wanted to share it with all of you here:

How to automatically have your blog's sitemap updated:
Let me make it easy for you. Simply build a new index template and copy and paste the following code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">

<url>

<loc><$MTBlogURL encode_xml="1"$></loc>

<priority>1.0</priority>

</url>

<MTEntries lastn="9999">

<url>

<loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml="1"$></loc>

<lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc="1" format="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ"$></lastmod>

</url>

</MTEntries>

</urlset>


Save it in xml format and rebuild your index. That's it!

To let Google know about your map, open your browser and enter the following in the address field:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= + the URL-encoded location of your sitemap

For example:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.x10.com/sitemap.xml

If you have a Google account you can use it to track. See: http://www.google.com/sitemaps/

Posted by MarkoW at 06:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Good Morning everyone!

As threatened here's "Social Bookmarking" (Part II.)...

Now that we talked a bit about what social bookmarking is, I'd like to introduce a few of the most popular providers.

www.del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. Use del.icio.us to:

- Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.

- Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.

- Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite - they've already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.

www.reddit.com
Reddit is a source for what's new and popular on the web -- personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you'll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes. All of the content on reddit is submitted and voted on by users like you.

www.digg.com
Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

www.technorati.com
Technorati is a pool of stories on what is happening on the real-time web. To find out what people are saying about any subject or website, just enter some text or a website address (URL) in the search box and and click the "Search" button.

Posted by MarkoW at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hello fellow bloggers!

Today I'd like to steer your attention towards something that becomes more and more popular, and is commonly known as "Social Bookmarking".

Most of you are probably familiar with the standard bookmarking. The latest research suggests that there are approximately one gazillion websites out there (source: Wikipedia), but who can remember even only 1% of that?
Standard bookmarking is a nice and easy way to save our favorite web addresses and easily access them from within our browser.

One of the limitations of the standard bookmarking is that all your bookmarks are stored locally on only one computer. Have you ever lost all your bookmarks because you had to crash your PC? I went through that several times. Another classic: You hang out at your friend's house, really wanting to show him that funny website, but you can't because you don't find the web address, and your bookmarks are on your PC at home.

For these reasons (and more) some people started to save their bookmarks online. ITlist.com was the first in 1996 that offered an online bookmarking service. Soon online bookmarking became competitive and other providers like Backflip, Blink, Clip2, Hotlinks, Quiver, entered the market. Early in the game online bookmarks could be categorized, searched and shared with other users. The categorization reached a new level when people started "tagging" their bookmarks.

Tagging simply means that you can associate certain keywords with your bookmark. For www.x10.com for example, a "Home Automation" tag would be likely.

Now, in a social bookmarking system people store whole lists of bookmarks, tag them (categorize them by keywords), and them share them with other people. The advantage of such a system is huge!

Where before often machines (Search Engine Bots, etc) categorized online content, it is now users like you and me, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource.

Additionally, web users can get somewhat of an idea about the quality of a website, because naturally only the better websites get bookmarked a lot. This makes social bookmarking networks a real alternative to traditional search engines, that have much more complicated ways to determine the quality of a web resource. In fact, I believe social bookmarking will grow in an exorbitant manner for exactly this reason.
Think of it: Who knows better what you're interested in, than other users with the same interests?

I don't want to leave out some of the bugs of social bookmarking. The biggest bug being the uncontrolled tagging. I mean there is no standard set of keywords, so that people often use very different keywords for the same website. But with the providers growing, I am convinced it is only a question of time until these issues will be addressed.

Tomorrow in Social Bookmarking Part II., I'd like to tell you a bit more about those social bookmarking networks and their services.

Have Fun!

Posted by MarkoW at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (92) | TrackBacks (0)