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.
Looking Closely at User-Generated Content
Amazon is a website that is perennially at the top of Google’s rankings – for its popularity with customers of course; but as those in SEO know, Amazon’s pioneering efforts in allowing customers to rank its products, and write reviews, have given the site a boost in a way that only a constant stream of new content is known to be capable of doing. Amazon realizes that an active user community on its website helps newcomers trust the company more. In a recent move, they’ve started a program called Vine that helps reward the best contributors to its website, with free products.SEO is usually is all about paying attention to every last word that is published on your website: you have to be careful that the right keywords come up often enough, and so on. Using user generated content is a new kind of SEO though. You are supposed to exercise your SEO while you trust other people to do the right thing while you have only a moderate degree of control over it. You usually need to pay attention to areas like seeding the forum when user input thins out, and judging to see whether there are enough tags and other opportunities at interlinking the content generated. There is actually a software product that helps you analyze the user content on your forum; it is called Leximancer. It helps you analyze your user content to see how often your targeted keywords turn up, and analyze link ability in those keywords. You could easily check, for instance, how often a brand or product that you promote, comes to be associated with a positive or negative term. It also helps you gain some insight into the psychology of your visitor by analyzing the content for you.
Software like Leximancer also helps you moderate your forum by giving you some tools in text mining. On a very large forum with hundreds of pages of user generated content,you can easily zero in on hecklers, bullies and people who break your rules for, say, family-friendly content. With the way webmasters race for fresh avenues in obtaining free content, user generated content and software to manage it effectively,certainly deserves a close look.
Local Domain Name Suffixes are Second Best – Fact or Fallacy?
To anyone with the foresight to plan their SEO approach right at the start when they think of a website concept, it has to occur at some point to them to wonder – should they go with an international domain name suffix, a .com or the like? If they choose a local domain with their own country’s suffix, will they forever sound to all visitors like they are some kind of a provincial loser? People have been wondering about this for about ten years now; even if the rule has always been clear. A local domain name beats an international .com hands-down any day. If it is all that clear, why do people constantly look longingly after a .com suffix for as if they couldn’t believe they’re really on the Internet until people get to type in a .com to reach them?
Let’s say you live in Madrid, and you are looking for a classifieds publisher where you can put up your used computer for sale. You just type ‘computer classifieds’ into a search engine, and you get results like ‘loot.com’ and also ones like ‘loot.es’. If you didn’t know anything about either site, which would you choose? Since a classified ad is really all about your local region, surely you would think that the .com sites were just too generic to waste your time on. People do tend to gravitate towards local offerings over the generic, because they feel that there would be more relevant information there.
In link building endeavors, other local sites in your region are likely to be better disposed to linking to you if you have the same local domain name as theirs. What is more, there are many local directories that won’t approve of indexing your name, unless you’re local. And basically, search engine algorithms tend to reliably rank you, if you’re local. Sites of the same dot com linking to one another are not all that valuable. Having really different websites linking to one another is. If you split your dot com into many different countries with different suffixes, you stand a better chance. Moreover, it is quite common these days to find hosting in a country other than your own. You would be virtually guaranteed a proper listing and ranking in your own country if you used a proper local domain suffix getting your site served there. And in hours too.
So why do SEO experts still continue to think that a .com suffix is somehow more equal than the other suffixes? It could be that they just use English keywords in their research to test sites they design for search availability. The language barrier is just too great. If people could just move out of their comfort zone and research all the parameters that actually matter, language and others, the local domain suffix, or the ccTLD would always come out the winner.
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.
SEO Failings at Large Companies
Corporations have a culture of trying their best at reducing everything important that affects their business down to simple numbers; and getting website or SEO success down to simple figures is a real puzzler. Major corporations just do not have any sympathy for the seat-of-your-pants process that is SEO. To corporate marketing departments who live and die by the focus group and traditional advertising, giving control over to the SEO desk at the IT department must be very difficult – especially the established interests at the marketing departments and the advertising agencies.
Retailing is really beginning to bite the dust these days. Why is it then that when you search for a product they might carry, the only thing that shows up at the top of the search listing is Amazon and eBay? Why not the regional discount majors? Perhaps those businesses think that getting their AdSense spot next to the search listings is enough. But it so happens that almost all searchers find it difficult to trust those ads.
Search for Sony Ericsson on Google; the first natural listing you get will be the global homepage where you to choose your region, with nothing else interesting going on. Search for Nokia, and you’ll straight away get your regional website , lots of content with no country select. Putting much content on the main authority page is good SEO. Another mistake made has to do with how there ends up being a lot of product information that is duplicated across dozens of pages. This makes it easier for a customer to search, but it is confusing for Google’s bots – and they turn their nose up at duplication.
The thing to do on an enterprise website design is to give each product page with similar content, a unique URL. Google needs to see which page of a bunch of similar ones is the main focus. Google also hates to see that there are not as many pages as promised on the website, or that there are as many pages as promised, but the pages are mostly empty.
There are many major companies out there that really need customer love on Google.And still, they do not make it to the top ten. SEO is an important resource that these companies could invest in.
Text-link Advertising – Sneaky, and Possibly even Illegal SEO
Have you heard of InLinks, the new SEO product from the advertising company MediaWhiz? This is how it works. Businesses or anyone who wants Google to think of their website when anyone types in certain keywords into the search box, start by buying advertising from MediaWhiz. The advertising company will use the advertising to pay blogs around the Internet to look up those keywords in their stories ,and and turn them into proper links (not ghost links that can tip off Google) to the advertiser’s website. With lots of links pointing inward, Google will think the advertiser’s site is pretty important and rank it high.
There is just a little problem with this scheme though: it is against the law in many countries, to manipulate search results with payments made. It is considered an unfair trade practice. Google certainly seems to have no real way of identifying when websites do this. But one wonders, what could happen if Google does find a way. Those advertisers could suddenly find their websites blacklisted. One way they could find out right now, is to compare an old cached copy of the website to a new version with many new links suddenly pointing inward. What if it puts them in the sandbox? This kind of maneuver is known as Text-Link advertising and Google is already asking Internet users to report these websites.
What kind of blogs are they that sell links to the highest bidder? Well, Engadget and Gizmodo do, charging just a few dollars a month per link. And Google would be able to see there was something funny going on to suddenly have a bunch of keyword links appear on an old article. Keywords are usually there was an article goes online the first time.
How Widespread is the Use of SEO among Established Websites?
Is it only the small struggling startup Internet company that desperately uses SEO? There are some who believe this: that established companies do not really need to use SEO. They do, because every reputable company has reputable competitors. Well, what better instance of respectability in a votary for SEO could one ask for then, than the august one of the BBC News site? The company estimates that a third of all visits to the website at BBC News comes from search engines, and it is finally choosing to turn to SEO The BBC plans SEO in this way: each article headline is to have twice as many words, to better help search engines locate it.
So how does a serious organization like BBC News do SEO? All news stories on the website from now on will carry two separate headlines. One of them will be the regular short variety, with about 30 letters in them. These short headlines will appear on the home page, the website index and will appear to cell phone visitors. The SEO one, which will be nearly twice as long, will hold more descriptive words and will be visible to search engines. In a world where most websites are visited via a search engine listing, or by way of Google News, or by Twitter recommendations, SEO has just become the way websites are created these days.
There is just one shortcoming to the use of SEO: the temptation to mangle even flow in an idea , just to bring in the search term as often as possible; or to get greedy, stuffing in important search words whether or not they belong in a sentence. As long as one doesn’t get too greedy, the BBC states, putting in a few extra keywords can only help in making a title more understandable.
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.
Is Google’s caffeine going to be the new ‘stimulant’ for Search Engine Optimization?
Google has released its newest project for general public testing and is still waiting to be launched. Nicknamed “Google Caffeine”, it includes crawling, indexing, and ranking changes which appears to be replacing the existing Google search engine. Unlike Google’s previous project- Search Mash, the latest search engine contains a Developer preview which requests webmasters and power searchers to try it and give them some form of feedback. While Microsoft’s Bing contains changes that are user interface related, most of the changes Google has incorporated are infrastructure related and this is very evident in the search results.
Surprisingly the layout of all the search results has also been modified. Initially searching for a specific topic would produce a bunch of related links and results, whereas the Google caffeine now has a specific format. It first gives text related results for the particular topic in question, and then follows it up with videos and finally links which contain images of that topic. So in short a specific issue is not only provided with pages and pages filled with detailed information but halfway down, the page is supplemented with videos and images. This expands the vistas available for search engine results and opens up new opportunities for search engine optimization.
“Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve,” Google’s head of Webspam, Matt Cutts said. This is Google’s latest initiative to display its relentless push to improve the quality of its service. “Google has let Caffeine quietly slip out. It talked about vertical specific searches while quietly doubling the speed and starts introducing real-time results and news feeds,” said Martin McNulty of the search marketing specialist Trafficbroker. With the feedback it seems to be getting, Google’s Caffeine is definitely the next platform for sites to gain leverage from and ensure they have high page ranks by filling their websites with the right amount of content and adding a visual flavour to their products.
SEO advice of the year
Every business entrepreneur needs to know the secrets of SEO techniques to optimize their site and get high search engine rankings. Recently, Matt Cutts who is the head of the Web Spam team gave a presentation at SEO Advice of the Year. He provided excellent advice and insight from Google on optimizing WordPress for search engine ranking.
Have a look at some points he made under the title “Straight from Google: What You Need to Know”:
Use wordpress to get a head start:
Blogging is a great way to lead a load of traffic to your website. WordPress is absolutely free to use so you can save there. One of the good things about WordPress is that you get to receive comments and feedbacks from your readers and interact with them.
Choosing content keywords:
Needless to say, choosing keywords for content is the most essential process in improving the rankings of your pages on Google and other platforms and search engines. Analyze keywords, which are used by your visitors to visit your site and implement them in your site content. this will enable you build targeted traffic to your site.
Post informative content:
By posting creative and informative articles, you can attract more people, and increase the call to action.
Use Google’s free webmaster tools to optimize your site:
Webmaster tools are useful for business owners who are keen to see how their sites are performing in Google. With Google analytics, you will be able to tune your site and stay ahead of your competitors.
Use wordpress plugins:
WordPress SEO plugins have some of the smartest options to optimize your wordpress blog for search engines.
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