Wherever there is a positive thing, it can often attract a negative reaction. With a utility like a blog, spammers often try to take advantage of a poorly secured commenting system. Blogs can allow users to make comments on each blog, and although positive comments can be a good thing, if you are not monitoring it carefully, spammy comments can creep in and not only make your site look less credible, but it can also harm your organic search ranking.

Comment spam is usually done by site owners who believe it will help with SEO and are usually pretty easy to spot, normally containing one liners or links.

Avoid Comment Spam Abuse

Google recently blogged about Comment Spam at their blog, and offer the following recommendations:

• Disallow anonymous posting.
• Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
• Turn on comment moderation.
• Use the "nofollow" attribute for links in the comment field.
• Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
• Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

These are all good recommendations and you should check your blog software to see if you can implement any of these suggestions.

If you have checked your web site now and notice lots of spammy comments, it’s not too late. Go through your comments, and delete the spammy ones.  If you use blog software like WordPress make sure to enable the AKISMET plugin immediately!

Alas, my top 6 Myths of SEO

SEO Myth 6: My Web Designer Can Do SEO

What a loaded comment this one is. From my own experience, most web designers do not know enough about SEO to compete aggressively with your competitors in the online marketplace.
Think about it; if they were fluent with SEO, why are there so many SEO specialists and companies? 

When you are interviewing web designers to have your web site developed, don’t assume they will help with your search optimization, even if they say they will. Gather facts, case studies and some kind of proof of work from them. You might even consider asking them if they are willing to work with an SEO company like ours to help them build your web site for Internet Marketing success.

If you really evaluate the basic tasks relating to SEO, they really are in sharp contract to the creative skills needed from a web designer.   Why would someone that specializes in building wonderful design work have the task oriented skills necessary to develop an ongoing SEO campaign.  There are some designers that know there stuff.  But from my own experience, the ones that truly care about the art of web design choose to specialize in just that.

SEO Myth 5: SEO is All About Keyword Density

There has always been two sides to this argument in the SEO world. Those that believe in keyword density and those that do not. I have always been in the “do not” category, and as time goes by this is becoming more evident.

There was a thought that you needed a certain percentage of keywords (commonly 4%) in your page copy in order to rank for those terms. Obviously, you will need a certain degree of keywords in your page content to help with your rankings of those terms, but with other factors, such as linking and content themes weighing heavier, you can safely put away your calculators.

SEO Myth 4: SEO Is Guaranteed

We hear this all the time.  SEO companies or individuals guaranteeing results as if they have some special connection with Google to offer their sites preferential treatment.   I think you know where I am going here. SEO specialists cannot guarantee results simply because we are not the ones responsible for showing results. Those items are left to Google, Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines.

Google in fact issues strong warnings against any company that does make this claim.  From the SEO guidelines page of Google itself:

"No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.

Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever."

The job of an SEO practitioner is to make modifications to your on page and off page SEO campaign to aid how search engines see and index your web site.  Companies that guarantee rankings often make these claims to get you in the door.  After you have invested several months of both your time and money these are both items that you cannot get back once you realize how false these claims were.

SEO Myth 3: Meta Tags Are Dead

There is a fairly recent suggestion that meta tags are dead and no longer needed to be integrated into web pages. So, to clarify all of this, I will explain further. There are 2 main meta tags with SEO importance, the keyword meta tag and the description meta tag.

Meta Keyword Tag

Google has confirmed that they do not include the meta keywords as a ranking factor, due to abuse by webmasters many years ago.  That said, there are still a few search engines that rely on this meta tag, and although it may represent a very small number of visitors, why would you want to potentially exclude any type of visitor search. Furthermore, Google has left the door open to potentially use the meta keyword tag in the future.

My recommendation with the meta keyword tag is to continue using it, if for nothing else it is good practice. In addition, keep the key phrases down to around 6 to 12 phrases, and highly focused to the specific page.  Remember – good SEO means ensuring as many good standards are followed as possible.  It certainly isn’t a bad thing to ensure you have relevant keywords in your tags.

Meta Description Tag

There is plenty of debate over how much significance the meta description has in the algorithm of search engines. But one thing that is clear, is the meta description phrase is displayed at times in the search results pages under the clickable title of result listings. If nothing else, here’s your chance to increase your click-through rates by writing compelling and unique descriptions for each of your web pages.

Again – this is good practice in offering search engines the most relevant content possible for its audience.

SEO Myth 2: Writing Content For Google

I have seen a few ‘so-called’ SEO experts recently, during their presentations or seminars encourage attendees to write their content for Google. Nothing could be further from the truth and even Google, usually pretty low key when it comes to SEO recommendations, says to make sure you write content for visitors and not for search engines.

After all, who is going to buy your product or service? Google or a human searcher looking for you? The other aspect is conversion. Once a visitor hits your site, which page is more likely to turn this person into a lead? One that is short, to the point and has a call to action or lengthy newspaper style content that regurgitates the same words and phrases over and over?

SEO Myth 1: SEO Can Be Plugged In

Can I have a drum roll please - now we have come to what in my mind is the #1 SEO Myth. The myth that somehow you can attach SEO to your site like lego building blocks. One of the main reasons I rank this Myth #1 is simply the ramifications it can have for the owner of the web site.

Trust me when I say, that no one (and I mean no one!) likes to hear me say that the large sum of money they have spent on their beautiful web site needs to be spent again, to redevelop their web site from the ground up. I can’t think of anyone who would be happy to pay twice for what is essentially the same product.

All too many times, I hear web site owners when quoting for a web site, say they will worry about SEO after the site is designed. For the uninformed, SEO has the perception that it can somehow be added on to an any existing web site. In some cases, it can. But how do you know for sure? Now that you know the financial implications, why take the chance?

The best analogy I can think of is to look at SEO as the electrical wiring of a house. If you are having your new home built, would you tell your contractor to do the wiring AFTER the house is built? Of course not!  Especially since it means ripping out holes in the walls and tearing down other parts of the house. Well guess what? You need to build your website with SEO in mind from the outset.  You can’t add a plug in at a later date that suddenly makes a site search engine friendly.

So there you have it.  My very own fast and brash list of my top 13 SEO Myths.

For those that want to learn more I highly recommend you take a read of Google’s very own SEO guidelines which they published as part of a PDF back in November 2008.

So, I’ve decided to put together my ‘Top 13 Myths of SEO’ list to dispel some SEO untruths and to clarify many SEO beliefs that seem to circulate persistently. 

Top 13 Myths of Search Engine Optimization

SEO Myth 13: A Blog Helps SEO

While I agree, a blog can have a dramatic & positive effect in your organic SEO rankings, it is important that you utilize the blog properly. One example includes; Installing the blog on your domain, and not using third party remotely-hosted blog platforms.

SEO Myth 12: Don’t Use Dynamic URLs

Dynamic URL’s are usually database generated, and may look like index.php?page=product&id=1234. When Google was just a baby, it did have trouble crawling and indexing these types of URLs however, that was many moons ago and no longer an issue. That said, there is a small gain by using SEO-friendly URLs to include relevant keywords, eg) /keyword1/keyword2.php.

SEO Myth 11: Google XML Sitemap Gets You Ranked

Contrary to some belief, Google XML Sitemaps do not directly affect or help your rankings in Google’s search index. Back in 2005, Google announced an experimentation called Google Sitemaps and the goal was to help webmasters get their web pages indexed a little faster. It is a nice little tool that will help get your pages crawled faster when new pages are uploaded and/or you decide to switch between domains.

SEO Myth 10: PPC Ads Will Help Rankings

There was a thought among many that if you ran Google AdWords campaigns, it will help with your organic Google results. This thought gained traction because since organic searches are essentially a free service from Google, that if you paid for PPC Ads, Google would give you a boost organically. Not True!  PPC has never helped your organic rankings in Google and never will!

SEO Myth 9: Search Engine Submission Can Help You Get Ranked!

Unbelievably, this one still seems to make the rounds. I will keep this simple, You do NOT have to submit your web site to search engines. All you need is one link pointed to your web site from another or a Google sitemap submitted through Webmaster Tools.  Iti s all FREE!

SEO Myth 8: SEO Is A One Time Deal

Let’s put this one into perspective.
Is maintaining your car a one time deal?
How about house cleaning? Is that a one time deal?

The fact of the matter is search engines regularly modify their algorithms, so you need to adjust accordingly. What about your competitors? Think you can dominate your competitors while standing still? Think again. An ongoing, ethical SEO strategy needs to be employed if you want to be successful.

SEO Myth 7: HTML & Table-Less Design

This is an interesting one and some web designers have taken advantage of this by saying they can do CSS web design, which will help your Search rankings. The idea behind this myth, is that a CSS design contains less html code, therefore a higher percentage of textual content as well as it appearing higher up in the source code. Even Googler Matt Cutts dispelled this ideal. You can have the worst coded site and it can out-rank a cleaner CSS one.

All that said, it is a good idea to conform to a non-table design. Aside from conforming to web industry standards, you will also have a faster loading web site and one that will have better usability. But don’t be fooled, simply re-designing your web site this way will not mean better rankings.

To Be Continued …

Check in a few days from now, when I put up Part 2 and run down the top 1 to 6 SEO Myths.

So far I have been fairly impressed with Bing. Results are fairly relevant and in particular, i like all the new features added.  It seems Microsoft is pushing the envelope a little and becoming quite innovative. 

The goal of this blog is to focus on some of these new features of Bing that you may or may not be aware of.

Examining Many Of The New Bing Additions

On initial arrival to Bing the most noticeable difference is the large image front and centre, which changes daily. While I think this is a great visual appeal and definitely unique, it provides for some mystery meat navigation. In fact most people may not even notice that if you move your mouse around the image, a highlighted box is becomes visible with interesting stats of the photo. In addition, it would be beneficial to place a visual heading that titles the image. But instead have to hover over the Registered Trademark R to get this information.

Hover your mouse over the photo to reveal 4 interesting points about the image with links to the query.

Searching Bing To Make A Decision

Bing is touted as the ‘Decision Engine’, whereby you conduct a search and in addition to the regular results down the middle of the page, Bing also provides relevant, similar results to help users filter through the results to help users refine their queries.

One of the new features you will notice beside each listing, when you hover your mouse is an orange dot which reveals more information about that link, usually including links to sub pages, similar to Google’s SiteLinks.

A search for baseball results:

Using the same search query of “baseball results” reveals two other new features, the actual baseball scores of the past two days, as well as related searches of the initial query.

Bing also has a feature called Instant Answers. Need to find out the status of a flight? As mentioned in yesterday’s Google search feature post, Google has this feature already.

How about a quick calculation? Google has this feature too.

In need for a new car? I used Honda for my car of choice. The results page reveals an extended left column navigation called the Explorer Pane with 2 sections. The top one includes sub-section searches based on the initial query and the second area is related searches based on popular searches by visitors. Studies have shown that users often refine their initial search query by adding on new words to the search.  Those 2 new features attempt to address this. Try it out using other brand names.

Planning on traveling to another city? Toronto, perhaps? Similar to the Honda search you will find a related search box, plus the sub section query area, where Bing tries to match the initial query with results pertaining to the query.  In this case Toronto’ Weather, Map, Hotels, Airport, Real Estate and Images and then breaks them down below in the main results section.

Bing has some additional features similar to Google, such as Search History and Search Suggestions

Bing Images and Videos utilize the left side Explorer Pane as well allowing users to refine their search for images and videos.

Shopping for a gift? Bing makes it easier to find and review products through the search pages. Sort by brand, category and price. Handy links for product features as well as user reviews.

Conclusions about Bing Features

All in all from a user’s perspective I find all these additional features very handy.  Is Bing a Google killer? Hardly, but I have no doubt this new search engine revamp by Microsoft will make Google stand up and take notice.

From a Search Marketer’s perspective we live and die by the clicks from each Search Engine.  This is evaluated through Analytics and hence are able to define the saturation and market penetration of each Engine. I wonder if all these extra features will result in less click-throughs from Bing? Food for thought as we will continue to evaluate Bing’s progress.

What do you think of searching on Bing?

Why did Google do this? Well probably for a few reasons.

Reasons For Google Adwords Ad Placement Change

Firstly – SURPRISE! Google uses Google Analytics!  Google is always experimenting in some fashion. You don’t get to be cutting edge by standing still, so this shouldn’t be a huge shock.

One possibility is the advancement in computer monitors. With manufacturers building larger monitors with larger pixel screen real estate, it would have cause the right-aligned Google Ads to appear further away from the regular listings right up against the right side of your screen.

Another possibility is simply to garner higher click through rates for Google’s advertisers. AdSense users have been using this tactic for years, whereby they put Google’s Ads close to content and also right along side navigation areas in an effort to fool visitors into clicking the paid ads, rather than un-paid navigation links.

A third possibility is competition. Have you noticed where Bing’s Paid Ads are located?

Pretty similar, huh?

It’s All About Usability

In the end it is important to remember that virtually all of the revenue received by Google is from Google Adwords.  They are always treading a thin line between increasing revenues and ensuring a positive user experience. 

Try making the screen so that you can adjust the window size.  You will notice that if you decrease the size of the screen from right to left that the Google ads will continue to appear on the screen to the point that you can even make them run over the Organic listings.

The question then becomes do the new ads improve usability or are they over the fine line of replacing usability for revenue.

Only Google would know — through Google Analytics!

Microsoft + Yahoo! Equals One Search Engine

As you are probably aware, Microsoft and Yahoo have partnered up to combine forces against Google. More importantly, Yahoo! will be using the Bing search engine all across Yahoo’s Web Properties, ditching their own engine by selling it to Microsoft.  Historically, most SEO’s optimize primarily for Google first, knowing that much of that work will translate to Yahoo! and MSN results as well. After all it doesn’t make sense to spend 80% of your time working for something that may net you only 6% (MSN) or 9% (Yahoo!) return.

Once this new “Mic-Hoo” partnership is fully integrated, Bing will have an immediate market share of at least 15% and perhaps as much as 30% (depending who you speak with) once the full roll out is completed and Bing continues to gain steam. This will undoubtedly force industry folks to stand up, take notice and give Microsoft some due props for being innovative and not laying down to continue being steam-rolled.

Microsoft & Yahoo History

Just an interesting little history lesson in search…
Way back in 1997, Microsoft didn’t have a search index and announced a partnership with Inktomi Corp. (anyone remember them?), who at that time was considered a “search-technology leader”. You can read the full press release here, Microsoft Joins With Inktomi to Provide Comprehensive Search Capabilities for Microsoft Online Properties
Wow, 1997…  Back then Inktomi claimed to have indexed 75 million web documents. The next year, in late 1998 Google opened it’s doors and almost exactly one year ago, Google announces it has reached 1 Trillion indexed pages.

In 2002, Yahoo! purchased Inktomi.  For Microsoft, what a kick in the teeth to have a major competitor purchase one of their most important vendors. This is what prompted Microsoft/MSN to start work on their own search engine. Now Microsoft buys Yahoo’s search engine!

Optimizing For Bing

Bing’s Whitepapers

ON June 1, Microsoft released the whitepapers for Bing. Of note, is the following that was said in relation to SEO.

What do I need to do for SEO with Bing?
All of the benefits from these enhancements are available to websites that invest in SEO. Webmasters can help their websites get more visitor traffic by helping Bing best represent their content to searchers in our SERPs. Webmasters can easily do this by adding unique titles and meta descriptions to each page. If webmasters don’t provide search engines with good, keyword-oriented, well-written caption source data, the resulting captions created by algorithm, no matter how hard we try, won’t represent your website as well as those websites whose webmasters did provide this unique and important data.

The use of consistent data structures between pages on your website (such as placing similar data between pages using a similar tree structure, similar class names, support standard markup technologies, such as microformats, etc.) will also help improve the effectiveness of our crawler, which puts more of your content into our index.

Best of all, the type of SEO work and tasks webmasters need to perform to be successful in Bing haven’t changed—all of the skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously applies fully today with Bing. Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in Google and Yahoo! as well.

Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design.

What Do You Need To Take Out Of This?

The good news is that we don’t have to completely over-haul how we do SEO with regards to Bing.

With Bing being so new, ultimately how we look at SEO’ing for Bing will change however, I’ve had a chance to do some preliminary testing, and you will notice that many of the SEO techniques we use for Google also apply to Bing, so here are some findings.

1. Keywords in URLS

Bing seems to like keywords in the url, whether it’s part of the domain name or a page name

2. Domain Age

How old a domain name is seems to be a factor here. So if you are planning to launch a new website/domain any time soon, you may consider purchasing an existing domain.

3. Titles & Meta Description

The title tag, as well as meta description appear to be a big factor in SERP weighting, so make sure you are crafting unique, relevant title tags and meta descriptions.

4. Linking Inbound & Outbound

Much like Google, inbound links especially with relevant anchor text seems to be well liked. In regards to Outbound links, there are plenty of mind-sets when it comes to Google. Many feel that outbound links should be avoided since it will leak PR (PageRank), however, i have the opposite sentiment, in that if the outbound link supports your web page, and is relevant then you should do it, and Bing agrees. Just don’t over-due the outbound linking.

5. No Love For Blogs?

I am hearing that Bing doesn’t seem to have the same kind of love for blogs, as Google does. More research will be needed before i can quantify this.

Stay tuned for my next Blog, where we explore Bing’s user interface.

Webmasters, in many cases are not clear on why to choose one way over the other and do not understand that deciding one of these ways can help greatly in ranking better on search engines.

A Little History Of Subdomains & Google

First of all a bit of a better understanding is needed of domains and subdomains.  Pre 2007, Google treated all subdomains like they are there very own domain which is unrelated to the main domain.  ‘finance.gm.com’ was different from ‘gm.com’.  This method was often referred to as host crowding.  Since Google only liked to display 2 ‘finds’ per domain, this would challenge that result.  What could happen instead was that a company like GM could have an entire page of searches dedicated to them.

For example, if i did a search for General Motors and they utilized sub domains, the first 10 results might be from:
gm.com, finance.gm.com, dealers.gm.com, careers.gm.com, parts.gm.com, buick.gm.com, cadillac.gm.com, gmc.gm.com, hummer.gm.com, pontiac.gm.com

In December of 2007 Google made a tweak to their algorithm to make this scenario less likely to happen.  They began to favour subdomains quite so much.

The History of Sub Domains

In general, i don’t usually recommend the usage of sub domains however, if you really must…

Be sure the the content is distinctly unique from the main domain, and that you have lots of content for it.

The other benefit to sub domains, is for branding purposes. Since a sub domain is looked upon as a new and separate domain, you may have a preference to having cadillac.gm.com instead of cadillac.com. In this case they would be sectioning off the content on a separate domain for branding purposes.

The biggest issue with sub domains, is search engines view them as separate sites. Therefore they have the equivalency of separate domains.

With a sub domain, you now have to think about developing it as its own entity.  This means bringing in inbound links from other web sites. If, for example you have worked hard to bring in 1,000 inbound links to your main domain, you now have to bring in 1,000 links to your sub domains if you expect similar results, and if you have many of them, you are really piling up the workload for yourself.

That’s a very simplistic way of looking at it, but it’s usually enough to sway people to avoid sub-domains. 

Finally, another negative is that links from the sub domain to the main domain will be looked at as inbound links rather than an internal link and therefore will not distribute link juice.

There has also been a history of SEO’s and webmasters using sub domains for spam tactics, which is partially what stemmed Google to filter out overly repetitive sub domains returning in search results.

Using Folders For SEO Purposes

My recommendation when building out your web site is to use folders wherever possible.  Aside from the sub domain vs sub folder issue, folders are a nice way to keep your content themed and grouped and helps to keep your web files neatly organized. This is especially useful for larger web sites.

For SEO purposes one of the benefits of using sub folders is that those pages will leverage the power of the main domain and will receive a trickle-down effect from the inbound links the main domain has received.  In addition, cross-linking from these pages will be natural internal content links and not considered inbound, to allow for link juice to continue to flow through through the site.

Another factor of search engine rankings are the number of pages a web site contains. A sub folder will increase those numbers, a sub domain will not.

The Sub Folder vs Sub Domain Verdict

The only purpose I see to using subdomains is really for branding purposes.  Usually those purposes are seen more greatly by larger corporations or if you want to establish a separate entity that is still linked visually to your main domain. 

You can perhaps look at this blog itself for that!

In most cases, however, I strongly suggest going the other route.  For so many reasons, sub folders are better.  They help you grow the relevancy of your core domain, and they are even easier to remember for visitors.

Since I am an SEO guy, unless there is an extreme case make sure when facing this very question that you go with sub folders instead of a subdomain!

Further Notes

For those looking for further research on this issue, I urge you to read the following two articles.  This article is my opinion based upon my industry knowledge.  The facts delivered by these two were current as of December 2007.   Although they reported them as factual, the end results do not seem to support many of the claims that I read in the articles.

1. SEO Book

2. SE Round Table

3. Gotta Quirk

Yesterday officially in Google’s blog, Google Announces Chrome Operating System.

They call it a natural extension of the Google Chrome Internet Browser. Normally an OS provides the foundation, and utilities like a browser would be extended from there, so the statement seems little strange.  In fact, it seems Google has done it backwards!  Browser first and then an OS!

Chrome Operating System

According to the announcement, the Chrome OS is light weight, open source and initially designed to be used for netbooks, which is planned for consumer usage in the second half of 2010.

From Google About Chrome OS

"Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS.  We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform."

Google vs Microsoft Heats Up

Google mentions that they are talking to potential partners, so we will see how much impact this has and how much it unseats Microsoft’s foot-hold in the PC operating system market.

With Microsoft launching Bing recently, it will be very interesting to watch as the competition heats up between these two.

Microsoft powers up their Internet presence, while Google adds to their computer arsenal.

Seems like Microsoft and Google are increasingly operating under the same markets!

Feedback on Chrome OS

It seems at this point that the Chrome OS is only slated to be available on Netbooks.   These are mini laptops that are mainly used just to surf the net.  Like most products however, this will serve as a starting point to build software that works well for people.  The initial release is expected in 2010.  I would fully expect this to grow siginificantly (and for Microsoft to have a legitimate competitor) by 2012.

Domain Change? Notify Google

In your webmaster tools account, there is a new feature called Change of Address.  It is used to tell Google about your new website and URL.

This change stays for about 6 months, while search engine bots re-crawl and re-index your website.

How To Change Your Domain Address Using Google Webmaster Tools

1. On the home page of your Webmaster Tools account, click the site you want.
2. Click Site configuration, and then click Change of address.
3. On the change of address page, go to Step 4, and in the verified site drop-down, select the new site.
   Note: You must have already verified the new url domain.

Guide To Changing Your Domain

Here are some other things to consider when you do change the domain of a website to ensure minimal search engine ranking penalties.

1. Take a full back up of your web site files, including database, if any

2. Sign up for a new hosting account, if you haven’t done so already.

3. Upload all web files to the new hosting account, including any scripting configurations and database.

4. Once you are certain your website on the new domain is uploaded properly, log into your domain registrar, and update the nameservers of this new domain provided by your hosting provider.  Wait about 24 hours.

5. Hopefully your new website is up and operating properly. Be sure to go through the site carefully to ensure it is operating properly. You can use xenu link checker to ensure there is no broken links on your site.

6. Check to make sure your analytics is installed as well. Run your new sitemap.xml file and upload to Webmaster Tools, to notify Google of the new site.

7. Note: Do Not cancel your old hosting account. I recommend leaving it up for at least 3 to 6 months to ensure a smooth transition to your new domain.  This way you will have the old information there should you need to reference it.

8. Create 301 redirects from the old domain to the new domain
If the page names have not changed, you can simply add this line to the htaccess file and upload to your old domain.
Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com

9. Check in with Webmaster Tools on a regular basis to see the status of the new website to see that it is being recognized.

10. Start building new fresh links to this new domain

11. If possible, contact websites that have links pointing to your old domain, and ask them to update the link to point to your new domain page.

Note: Every website is completely different, and you will most likely notice a dip in rankings. Iif you follow this guide correctly, especially the sitemp.xml file and the 301 redirects, the dip in rankings will be a short one.

If you haven’t noticed lately, Google has a feature called Google Suggest, which dynamically lists suggested search terms as you type them.

The new features for Google Suggest are:

Logged In Personalized Suggestions

Google has estimated that as much as 25% of signed-in searches are repeat searches from the past month. A signed-in search requires that a user have a Google Account. So now when you are logged in with your Google Account and have Web History enabled, Google may show some relevant searches that you have performed previously. This is a great feature for those trying to remember what gave you the best results and when you cannot remember the web site URL once you completed the search.

Results Page Suggestions

Currently, Google had only showed suggestions in the original search query. But now users will be able to see suggestions on follow up searches. The additional tweak to this is when you search again, the first few suggestions will be related to your original search query, as you can see using the term roller coasters.

Link Suggestions

If Google thinks your search query is indicating you are looking to navigate straight to a specific web site, Google will list it so you can click it right away.

AdWords Sponsored Links

And finally, for those of you running sponsored, Pay Per Click Ad campaigns, Google may detect that the most relevant search result for your query is an Ad. The ad that is shown will be very similar in look to the Sponsored Ads, we have been accustomed to at the top and right column of Google’s page.

One additional note, due to user feedback, Google has decided to remove the result count numbers that show on the right side of the suggested terms.

Google Search Improvement Commentary

The results of these changes are consistent with what we have grown used to with Google.  A commitment to improving the search experience that goes far past any other search engine.  Google knows that they cant rest on their laurels (and market share).  In order to retain the market that they have attained they need to keep innovative, and ahead of the competition.  If these enhancements are a sign of things to come, we can all be certain that Google will continue to command 80% plus of all searches completed.