Though the bulk of a Web site's traffic may come from long-tail keywords, it's still disheartening when a site suddenly drops in ranking (or stops ranking altogether) for broad terms. Aaron Shear offers up tips for helping to figure out why a site's rankings may tumble for specific keywords, starting with checking out your server and page load times. "For example, my blog is on a hosted environment and can commonly take longer than two seconds to bring up a simple static article -- not the greatest user experience normally found," Shear says. "This is amplified when …

When it comes time to choose a domain, legibility, keyword usage and relevance should all be considered--but as Ann Smarty notes, so should the top-level domain, or the term that comes after the "dot." Top-level domains offer searchers and crawlers some insight into the kinds of content they may find on a site. An .edu for example, tends to be university or educational-based, while a .mil leads to military information. Smarty says that there are some key points to consider when choosing your top-level domain. First, is that in many searches, Google …

Google offers up definitions for four common Web serving techniques, explaining the differences between white hat--geolocation and IP delivery--and black hat options like cloaking. To be clear, cloaking violates Google's Webmaster guidelines, and if a site is caught doing it--it will be penalized by a drop in (or exclusion from) rankings. Cloaking is a way of serving the giant's crawler different content than the average user (be it something harmless like an ad, or malicious like malware). "If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you're in a …

Visual search engine searchme is the elegant Mac to Google's utilitarian PC. At least, that's what VC firms including Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures seem to believe, according to Andy Beal, as they've pumped some $12.6 million into searchme. That brings the alternative engine's total funds raised to more than $43 million. And while investing in a search engine may seem like a moot point given Google's dominance, Beal says that searchme has got the bells and whistles (and substance, of course) to snag at least 1% of overall search market share. "Let's just say that picking up …

Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's Platforms and Services division, outlined the software giant's battle plan for gaining more search market share at SMX Advanced in Seattle. He acknowledged that Microsoft still had some branding issues to deal with pertaining to search--as many people still call Live Search, "MSN search"--as well as having to improve the functionality (and reputation) of adCenter with marketers. Johnson used two examples of steps Microsoft was taking to deliver a better search product to advertisers--the recent HP deal and the rollout of a new offline, desktop-based campaign management tool. The …

In a two-part series, the Practical eCommerce team got up close and personal with a dozen Webmasters about their preferences regarding electronic shopping carts. E-tailers represented include Candles & Such, House of Antique Hardware and Xtreme Diesel Performance. One constant emerged in this second installment, and it's a consensus that Webmasters should completely test a shopping cart solution before committing to it. "Do lots of research before you settle on a solution," said one tester. "Ask lots of questions; have your complete online business model defined, mapped out and in a format that can be presented …

Tired of serving users a bland 404 error page? Live Search offers the Web Page Error Toolkit, which lets site owners customize their 404 pages and provide search results (possibly leading users to the appropriate info) at the same time. The application extracts keywords from the user's initial search (which can be from Live Search, Google or Yahoo) and serves up links to relevant pages within the site. Webmasters can control the domain and locale that the results come from, the number of results that show up, whether it offers spelling corrections and the entire error message itself.

Other than ratings and review services like TripAdvisor, it seems there may not be a plethora of social media outlets that cater to hotels and resorts. But as the Vertical Measures team notes, hoteliers can turn broad properties like Flickr and YouTube into their own personal link-building channels. Hoteliers should upload pics of their property, staff and special events to Flickr, and include a link back to their homepage as part of their profile. If optimized well, the images will also likely turn up in general searches for specific keywords. Readers also chimed in with social …

If some strange situation arose that forced you to choose only one analytics report--which one would it be? After poking fun at the absurdity of such a question, Avinash Kaushik suggests that "Outcomes by all traffic sources" would be his choice--regardless of service provider. Kaushik says that this kind of report provides two crucial types of visitor analysis: "Sources of traffic, and hence just a hint of customer intent," and "Outcomes" (or the impact of the site on user activity, the industry and the world). Knowing where your visitors come from can shed light on underdeveloped …

Distilled has launched a PPC ad competition to help raise money (and awareness) for victims of the cyclone in Myanmar (Burma). The task is to create a paid search ad that will drive traffic to the World Vision charity's donation page. Interested parties should create a blog post about the competition and include the ad copy, as well as a link to the post in the Distilled blog's comment stream. The prizes include a year's subscription to Distilled's Reputation Monitor tool, a three-month premium membership to SEOmoz, RankSense and Acquisio Search, as well as the latest books by …