Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs for short) gives more valuable data than you think and actually allows you to spy on any niche competition using simple research techniques “legally”. I’m sharing here some useful tricks to figure out how to use Google search operators to effectively do your research on competitors.

Although I’m sure that we’re all familiar with Google’s search operators when it comes to keyword research and optimization, some of you might already burned out all available tricks known to Google and even unknown ones! But I’m tapping these basic search operators again to demonstrate it from an SEO point of view and how extremely important is to narrow your search for optimum results and toward better decisions in your online business.

Tags to Technorati: competition, Google, keyword research, ranking, search operators, SEO, SEO Spy, SERP

This has been regularly asked question in forums and discussions and I’m blogging about this since web services for locals would be interested to get free and easy traffic to their sites.

In the big picture Google always push high quality pages in their SERPs in response to the key of delivering quality pages to users, and as always none is certainly sure how Google algorithm work to achieve this, but when it comes to local related searches like for instance this one (hotels in Paris) the old theory says that a site will more likely show in SERPs if the query talks about a location AND the site has the same Country Code Top Level Domain (CCTLD for short).

Tags to Technorati: IP location, local websites, page rank, ranking, SEO, SERP, Server

Walking an extra mile in design accessibility might cost some time, but with little easy tweaks you could improve site visitor experience and accessibility with a customized 404 error page.

Obviously, a 404 page shown when a visitor reached a url that can’t be found on the server, whatever the reason is your 404 page should deliver a clear message to the visitor and avoid any confusions, and as per Google webmaster central using a soft 404 page is not recommended for SEO reasons as quoted from google webmaster central

Tags to Technorati: 404 page, accessibility, coding, design, duplicative, SEO, Server, URLs, wordpress