Web 3.0 will Change the World – and Probably SEO Too
The Web 2.0 has been around for a few years now, and it has been exciting enough. It gave you a chance to shape a website yourself; and if you have a vision powerful enough, you could really shape the entire web even. But using the Internet today, to use search in particular, admittedly feels thoroughly last-century by most accounts. Today’s search experience is still very keyword-dependent; you could get very different results searching for, say, movies versus searching for films. Bing, especially, has received a lot of criticism for being too literal, and not trying to interpret a search, the way Google does.The next iteration of the Internet is around the corner ( a rather long corner); they call it the Web 3.0, and it’s all about putting a little intelligence into the way the Internet works. And will this ever be an SEO game-changer.If you ask your friend about what he thinks of the Yeti, what will he think Yeti means? If you are an anthropologist or a biologist, he may think you mean the rumored giant ape that is supposed to live in the icy upper reaches of the Himalayas. If you have no such special interests, he would probably think you meant the new SUV from Skoda that goes by that name. Web 3.0 is promoted as something that would be able to tell the difference. Web 3.0 is believed to achieve its additional insight into your searches, by keeping online an Internet profile of yours, that contains all the searching you ever did. Right now, if you are signed in to your iGoogle account, you could conceivably do something like this – it remembers all your searches. But the Web 3.0 experience is all about intelligence that can interpret this information. You can ask your search engine open-ended questions like, “Where should I go on vacation if I only have $4500 to spend?” And it should be able to look at different vacation packages based on places you’ve been to before, and places you’ve spoken about in your e-mails, look at all the different offerings on the Internet, and come up with a properly compiled results page.
There are currently intelligent music referring services even today that try to “understand” what your musical preferences are like, based on songs you already like. And it will try to look up all the new music that could fit your listening profile. But as anyone who’s tried a service like Pandora music explorer knows, the results of that artificial intelligence can often be very trying on the patience. Admittedly, science hasn’t advanced far enough to make Web 3.0 a reality. The intelligence comes from what they call Ontologies. An Ontology is a file that contains collections of information, and additional information on how everything in the file is related together. In fact, this was a part of the way the Internet was envisioned when it was first designed back in the 80s by Tim Berners-Lee. Software agents, automated web crawlers, use Ontologies to understand your browsing habits, and looks around the Internet for you. These Ontology files will be created manually, by people who donate their time – sort of a Wikipedia for computers, not people. Once the browser (and it would be called a semantic browser) is able to think for itself based on this information, undoubtedly, learning, knowledge, and science itself will change beyond recognition. SEO will probably need to evolve as well.
Vanity SEO
Google Alerts is the blogger’s best friend these days. Bloggers set alerts for the name of their business, to know what blogger or journalist mentions the name of their business in a positive way. When Alerts shows them the names of the blogs or online pages that have done so, they aim their efforts at making the best use of the interest observed. So how does this work?
The first thing to do, is to determine the keywords that are the most important to your business, and to set up alerts for them. You could check your leads with PageRank or SEOMoz Linkscape to determine how worthwhile and credible the writers are that mentioned your name, and then decide to go after them. You need to start building of a little database of all the bloggers, good credible ones, that appear to write positively about your site or business. Now, you need to strengthen your relationship with these writers; to this end, you need to start mentioning their name in your blogs or articles as well. They are probably monitoring your Google alerts as well for mentions of their name, and will know. If you put a link in your article to something by those bloggers, that will get you extra points with them.
Once you have carefully vetted the links and mentions to other people’s writing in your blogs, you will have gained top-of-the-head recognition with lots of important people; influential bloggers crave positive attention, and will remember the favor. Once you have many such tacit relationships with other community leaders, you can be sure that casual mentions in their blogs about you will be returned, and will build excellent referrals for you.
But it is important to not be gratuitous with the way you do your name-dropping. You need to be sure that you read through their articles to see how they referred to; you need to make sure that those really are respectable blogs. If Google sees that you have connections on your website to previously disapproved places on the Internet, it could only earn you negative results. Careful and earnest efforts at vanity searches, can easily get you great SEO results.
Can Bing become the Search Giant Killer?
Bing, Microsoft’s decision search engine, has been chipping away at the market share of its competitors since its official launch on May 28th this year. On an average, Bing has gained about half a percent a month and an overall 1.3% (9.3% in August, 8.9% in July, 8.4% in June and 8% in May) gain in the three months succeeding its launch. In about the same period Google, the market leader registered a fall of 0.3% to 64.7% while Yahoo came down by the same amount to 19.3% (source: ComScore). In August, Bing grew faster than Google for the first time, with a 31.9 percent annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6 percent growth for Google and 16.8 percent for Yahoo. So the rise in the market share of this Microsoft search engine does seem to be at the expense of the other two.
Some experts consider these early gains in the Bing market share the result of superior technology from its recent acquisitions and better algorithms for seeking the context underlying a search. Many users feel aerial photos available via Bing are more up to date and have better clarity than the corresponding Google photos. The eye-catching design too is bound to have helped Bing made inroads with viewers.
Skeptics, however, contend that this so-called increase in market share is driven by any number of factors such as the curiosity engendered by a new launch, the publicity and media hype that a hundred million dollar marketing drive is likely to generate, the fact that Bing is the default search engine on the latest versions of IE and Microsoft’s cash back offer for Bing users and is highly unlikely to last. Some of the skeptics also are casting doubts on the veracity of the statistics by stigmatizing the sources as unreliable.
A strong competitor to Google in the search market can only be good news for users. Google has for too long been almost a monopoly. The more choices that consumers get the more likely it is that necessity will drive more and more innovations in the search engine market.
How to design a website as per SEO requirements
Anyone starting a website to promote their products or services online should optimize it for search engines in order to be listed in their results pages (SERPs) and reach the intended audience. Instead of optimizing a site after launching it, it is better to design a website as per SEO needs.While crawling, web spiders will look for text on the site that is related to the search query. Hence, provide text relevant to products or services offered. The title tags, meta descriptions and keywords per page have to be unique and relevant. Provide keyword rich site content on relevant topics, as spiders judge your site based on these things.
Specify the site URL ( http://www.example.com/) that you prefer for your site and redirect the rest of relevant website URLs like www.example.com/index.html, http://example.com, example.com/home.asp etc to the preferred site URL by adding the 301 redirect (permanent) to the preferred URL, so that user entering relevant website URLs will be directed to your main site page.
Provide breadcrumb trail which is a navigation aid that shows both search engines and humans where their current location is and how far they are from the destination page.
Use limited number of graphics, and if possible, avoid them. Provide relevant anchor text to the image links, as spiders can crawl only anchor text and not images. Also the site uploading time is directly proportional to number of graphics on site.
A website designed by calling JavaScript and CSS code externally is a good one. Stay away from frames as search engine avoids them, and restrict the usage of flash, QuickTime or other plug-ins on HTML Pages.
On the whole, it is necessary to prepare a site with simple navigation and architecture for assisting search engines to easily find information on your site.
5 powerful link building techniques that really work
We don’t want to waste your time with unnecessary explanation on link building; here are the techniques to get back-links for your site.Link submission is the favorite technique followed in practice, to build site links. Submit articles related to services or products offered with your site link, to popular article submission sites like ezinearticles.com, webpronews.com, ideamarketers.com, goarticles.com, articlecentral.com, articlefinders.com etc. Also submit links to articles or your site on the social bookmarking sites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc.
Start a blog related to your products and/or services and update it regularly with great content. Visit other blogs and leave useful comments with your site signature to drive direct traffic to your site. Don’t forget to list it in the best blog directories.
Link exchange pays you well when you drive in the right path. It is the process of exchanging hyperlinks with websites that offer similar or related products/services. The three types of link exchanges are one-way link exchange, reciprocal link exchange and three way link. While exchanging links, keep in mind that getting links from pages with list of hundreds of off topic link partners is meaningless. Try to get links from sites with reasonable page rank, say above 4.
Submit your site to directories like DMOZ that offers free submissions, and you can also use paid directories. Also tag sites related to your site along with it on bookmarking sites like Delicious. This will attract users interested in your products/services, thereby driving effective traffic to your site.
A great way to drive more traffic is to place videos related to our products or services, on YouTube.
We have compiled only the link building methods that really work.
Shocking! Google page rank distribution data is not available in the webmaster tools
One can identify their site page rank from the page rank distribution data, based on which, they can improve their site further with quality content, implementing keywords relevant to your site, building quality back links etc.
Today Google has become the most popular search engine worldwide. It provides page rank distribution report to all webmasters and helps them improve their site consequently.
Unfortunately, many webmasters and search engine optimization experts are reporting that Google page rank distribution data is not available for their website in the webmaster tools.“If you login webmaster tools and click on crawl stats, there will be a message like” No data available. Please check back soon”.
John, the employee of Google says “We are working on resolving this issue. This data is informational and does not affect your site’s crawling, indexing or ranking”.
We hope Google will solve the issue soon and help webmasters improve their site to get higher page ranks.
Effects of the Microsoft – Yahoo deal on SEO
The recent buzz in the net world is the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal according to which Microsoft will integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its search engine Bing and Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Through the deal, Microsoft has taken a brilliant move to capture the search market.According to figures released by Hitwise last month, Microsoft’s search market share will rise to around 21.5% or roughly one quarter of Google’s share. Ergo, SEO people have to concentrate on Bing while promoting their clients’ sites for reaching all the net surfers.
When we focus on search algorithm, it is clear that Bing concentrates on keyword placement in the sub or root whereas Google focuses on exact keyword matches. By default, Bing’s results are richer than Google and Yahoo. It is more likely that the market for search engine Bing will expand.
If you don’t have an account with the Bing webmaster tool, it is time to start your account and learn the difference between Bing and Google to optimize your site for Bing.
Even if Bing does not overtake its rival Google, it will be the second largest search engine. Hence you have to work for Bing to reach global audiences irrespective of search engines used. Obviously the changes will not take place overnight, but potentially Google could have a much bigger, consolidated competitor in the near future.
Widget Marketing, a powerful marketing tool that drives traffic to your site
Widget marketing is a great way to drive viral traffic to your site from other sites. YouTube has got a lot of inbound links by allowing users to easily embed any hosted videos on blogs and web pages, thereby driving traffic through a natural search which is essential to increase its page rank.
It is just a onetime investment in man power for development and deployment of a widget. Once a useful widget is made available for the public, they will start embedding it in their site to expose your brand and drive traffic to your site. Webmaster embedding your widget in their site will become your marketing team. Thus widget marketing provides an extremely good ROI based on the resources available.
Here are some guidelines that will help you build an effective widget with the best SEO value for driving maximum traffic to your site.
Keep your widget informative, useful, interactive and simple to understand, as people will embed widgets only when they find it really useful for them.
The Internet technologies like Javascript, HTML, Adobe Flash etc used in the development of web-based widgets do not expose their content to search engines. Hence having a link inside widget’s embed HTML code is a must.
Don’t forget to add relevant keywords in the anchor text. If the technology that you used to generate the widget has the facility to randomize the embed HTML code generation, then make use of it to vary the anchor.
It is important to include both the logo and the name of your organization in a widget, to increase brand awareness while promoting your website.
If possible track the widgets and find which keywords work best for you.
Most powerful Firefox add-ons for SEO
Firefox has become popular among net browsers due to its attractive features including tabbed browsing, spell checker, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, keyboard shortcuts, and an integrated search system that uses the user’s desired search engine.Firefox offers thousands of add-ons that provide users the capability to customize Firefox according to their requirements. Here, we have compiled add-ons that help webmasters in search engine optimization.
Twitterfox
Twitter is one of the social media used by SEO experts to share their activities like recently posted articles, press releases, recent updates on products, with millions of people around the world. Twitterfox add-on will place a small icon near Firefox’s bottom tab. It will notify you when your friends update their status in Twitter, and also offers a text field to update your status. Thus you can follow up on tweets and update your twitter status without logging in to Twitter.SearchStatus
SearchStatus is specially designed for Search Engine Marketers (SEMs) to provide extensive search related information like Google PageRank , Compete.com ranking , Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming ranking, Linkscape mozrank, backlinks etc, of a visiting site. From this information, SEM can get a balanced view of a site efficacy. Analyzing a website or blog is so easy with SearchStatus.Firebug
It is a Firefox extension that includes web development tools such as editor, debugger, error console, command line and inspectors for debugging. With FireBug, you can edit, debug and monitor CSS, HTML, Java Script, and Ajax live in any web page conveniently. It is the ultimate editing tool for webmasters to find errors in Javascript, XML and CSS, and rectify them.IEview
As IE is used by more than 60% of internet users, it is a must for web masters to check how well their website works on IE. IEview is a simple Firefox extension that opens a current page or a selected link in IE with a single right-click, to check how their design works on IE without leaving Firefox. This add-on is useful for cross-browser testing.Colorzilla
Colorzilla is a color picker tool which is useful in choosing colors for advertisement headers or web design. It integrates a number of color-related analysis tools with your browser to get the exact hexadecimal code of colors. On placing your cursor on any specific pixel, the Eyedropper feature of colorzilla will display the RGB numbers, hexadecimal code, X-Y axis location and CSS properties of that pixel. Color plays a major role in attracting visitors. If you find attractive colors on any site, you can get its color code and use it in your site’s CSS design.English Dictionary
A website should convey messages clearly without any errors. A website filled with misspelled words, will definitely lose its power among visitors. English Dictionary is a very useful add-on that checks for spelling of English words. This add-on will facilitate your work by checking spelling and grammar as you write texts.
Beta version of WordPress 2.8 is available for screening
WordPress has released the Beta version of WordPress 2.8 and called the public to test it and file bugs. A lead developer of the WordPress development team has stated that they have implemented a lot of high-rated features listed in the WordPress Ideas Forum.
The lead developers have given top priority to widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades for the 2.8 version. Apart from this, they have tried to fix some bugs.
I have listed some of the new features that caught my attention:
1. New Theme Installer routines
2. Add Documentation (function) lookup to Theme and Plug-in editors
3. Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
4. Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
5. Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
6. Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
7. Don’t notify post author of own comments
8. Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab.
9. Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
10. Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
11. Improved Widget user interface
12. Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
13. Support more than one gallery on the same page
14. Improved database performance
15. Improved performance for script loading
16. Timezone enhancements for PHP 5
17. Add a function to output a generic widget anywhere in a template
18. Make login more pluggable
19. Add support for blocking all outbound HTTP requests
20. HTTP API updates and fixes
21. Add filters so AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber IM labels in user profiles can be changed.
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