Data Visualizations & Infographics

Need some inspiration for data visualizations & infographics?

Data visualization and infographics are powerful ways to communicate data, stats and information. In a world increasingly saturated with content and brands vying for attention, they are a potent way to tell your story, break through the clutter and persuade people to action.

One great place to get inspiration is in the explore section of +Visually which is consistently updated with new graphics at: http://goo.gl/5wnf0

If you're looking for more ways to visualize your Analytics data, check out the reporting apps in our Gallery at: http://goo.gl/GXVVa (including one from the Visual.ly team).

Forum Discussed http://goo.gl/UpMCf

Advice For Launching New Websites in 2013

Advice For Launching New Websites in 2013

Whether you are new to internet marketing or a veteran that was focused only on established sites, here are some tips about what to do and not to do when launching a new site. Of course not everything may apply to your personal situation. I also encourage you to debate the cost/benefit of these items.

-Start with a good CMS (content management system) that can grow without compatibility issues 

-Minimize the use of frameworks, plugins & add-ons, they are cool today but will cause headaches tomorrow 

-Focus on urls looking good to users & less for search engines 

-Avoid getting crappy links, its too dangerous in the long term and it sucks spending time removing them later 

-Ask yourself what your new site offers that isn't already on 100 other sites 

-Expect Google rankings to be weird for your first year 

-Good Google rankings don't mean your site is good, it is more likely that you are looking at personalized serps 

-Don't launch the site until its good enough to attract webmasters to link to it 

-If you use five years old seo tricks, expect Google to have five years of filters to counteract it 

-Google doesn't really care that your domain is old, they care more about long term inbound links 

-Incorporate canonical tags & verified author profiles 

-Unique ip hosting isn't that important, reliable ip hosting is much more important 

-Use a domain that is brandable and relates to your business, hyphens & keyword stuffed domains aren't ideal 

-Domains with good backlinks tend to outpace keyword domains with weaker backlinks 

-Once you find the perfect domain, check to see if it was previously registered and used for spamming 

-Use a good analytics program, it will help you make better business decisions 

-Archive all keyword data, its going away fast 

-Don't put 100 generic navigation links on every page, better to "theme" the page with a handful of links to relevant content 

-Ask yourself again what your new site offers that isn't already on 100 other sites and this time don't lie to yourself 

-Think about where you want your site in 5 years, then plan your site to minimize the change & redirects you will need 

-Better to have 100 great content pages than 10,000 auto generated pages 

-Your content pages are too short and users don't find enough value in them 

-Did you forget to embed relevant links within your content? 

-Smart webmasters can identify your network of sites by looking at backlinks, adsense/analytics code & other tells 

-Social signals like twitter mentions by real people are great for getting new sites crawled 

-Fake social signals that you can buy are mostly worthless 

-It isn't easy to launch a new site, it costs alot of time, money & resources. It is going to cost much more than you estimated. 

-The Google ranking algorithm isn't one simple piece, it has many different pieces and these pieces are run at different times 

-Launching a new site today is a much more weird process with many more anomalies than in the past 

Those are my general observations from my latest round of launching new sites. I am sure I overlooked some stuff so feel free to add your own or to debate what I've posted. 

forum discussion WMW

Contributed By, SEO Guru

Google Plus Rules of Engagement

These are not the 10 commandments. Just a basic list of things you should consider when you interact with others and what to expect as a result.

1) Followers are not a free gift granted for completing your profile.
Unless you are a celebrity or a known brand you will have to build your own audience.

2) Signing up does not entitle you to interesting stuff streaming in your home page.
All you get it's "What's Hot". Probably the most overrated content in G+. If you don't like it, you can remove it with the tool provided.
You will have to build your circles, follow people that post things you like, get rid of or reduce the noise of people that post things you don't like with sliders.

3) You must listen before you ask to be heard.
At the beginning you won't even have an audience. Shouting like Donkey in Shrek pick me, pick me won't do much. 
Posting a lot won't give you a big number of followers.
Keep in mind that control of the conversation in G+ is tilted toward the reader, not the publisher. You need 2 to tango. And you can't force anyone to read your stuff.

4) You reap what you sow.
Fill out your PROFILE and add a PHOTO. Publish 5 interesting posts about things you like to talk about (not what you want to sell). And go your merry way to find people.
If you want to be noticed +1 their posts (not all of them), comment on what you like, re-share if you want to tell others about this discovery and add the person to the appropriate circle.
If the person likes your profile, posts and comments, they will add you back.
Adding back is not mandatory in Google+. I might like you because you are a great singer, but you might see no reason to follow me.
Remember: every one is in control of their own stream by deciding who to add, who to ban and the content they want to see.

5) Shine by your posts not your comments
The post owner is the host. He is opening the door of his house but not for you to become the new owner.
Comments should be brief and to the point. Discussion is encouraged but any action that makes you take the stage will be seen as rude. If you wish to further interact with a particular person just send them a private  message rather than start a conversation within the conversation.
The quality of your posts will be reflected by the +1s, comments and re-shares you receive. Do not blame G+ for people not reacting to your post. You obviously are doing something wrong. Penalty: Go back to 4). :)

6) Only after you are recognized as a valuable member of the community, you will be able to do branding through pages, communities and expand your business
Guy Kawasaki calls it the NPR model. He says we watch the telethons because the rest of the time we get quality. If all you do is post to get a sale, you won't go far. 

7) When resharing give credit to the author and the person who made you aware of the information
Thanks +author.  Via or h/t (hat tip) +resharer. Never copy/paste someone else ideas.

8) If you have nothing nice to say just keep it to yourself
Believe me it's not worth the annoyance and the bad reputation. No matter how right you are if you tell someone off, you will be labeled a troll.
Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference. (Mark Twain). There are too many other posts that deserve your attention. Just move on.

9) Do not forget about the low hanging fruit
Those who have 100,000 followers attract a lot of comments and share a lot of valuable information. Follow them.
But if you only circle them and comment only on their posts with the expectation to be noticed rapidly, you are in the wrong place. Your comment will be drowned in seconds. Everyone is looking at the shining star not scrolling through 500 comments.
You should be searching for smaller crowds that give you a chance to be seen.

10) Expand your circles
From the book Consequential Strangers by Melinda Blau. Strangers provide novelty and information, shape our identity, and open us to new opportunities. They help keep us healthy and are invaluable when we’re sick. They fuel innovation, propel social movements, hasten the flow of new ideas, and are vital in times of uncertainty.
Stop saying "no" to new and different. Embrace the experience. Learn to accept different points of view. Start thinking about these little exploratory expeditions as adventures.  Some will be strange or duds, but most of them will be interesting and even wonderful.  Don't miss the opportunity to expand your circles.

Contributed By, SEO Guru
Source http://goo.gl/AMtxK

404 Errors

Sometimes we get some 404 errors in our WMT and when we look at the "Linked from" tab we see that the problematic URL is being linked in certain pages where if we do a quick check there is no direct link to that file, not even inside of the Javascript code. So, where might be the problem then? if your client's website is using flash, that may be the origin of the problem.

One of our clients had a small flash gallery and the SWF file was loading it contents from an XML file which contained the list of images to be displayed. The SWF path was correct, the gallery was working seamlessly and we were continuously getting and 404 in WMT for those XML files. Obviously that XMLs were only linked inside the SWF files, and that was when we realized that Google was trying to index the SWF contents and when doing that it was crawling a wrong path for the XML files, and that was the reason why we were getting 404 errors alerts in files we never linked inside pages without a simple direct or visible link to them.

The solution, add the full path in the link to the XMLs files inside the SWF or a slash at the beginning of the URL to avoid the creation of non-existent URLs.

I hope you find this small tip useful, but sometimes when you don't know where the problem is or where to look for... it's a good idea to try other things that might not have sense at all at the beginning.

Authority Is A Big Word

Authority Is A Big Word: Word Focus on 8 Quality Signals As I See It

#1 Quality of the Content: It has always been the king. However, it's subjective. You never know if it is quality enough in the eyes of search engine.

#2 Social Sharing And Comments: Lately, I have seen some brands and so called authority sites do not put the social sharing buttons. I decided to remove these buttons and it doesn't seem to have any affect on the site. I think, it depends on the topic of the site. Some may need to socialize and some may not - socializing could be pointless to info site and how-to sites. 

 #3 Many Comments I don't know how many read comments and stay longer because of these comments. It's a fraction, unless the topic is very controversial. Comments are good if they add something to the page and wouldn't harm its SEO. 

 #4 Linking Out: When the link gives an added value to the readers. Of course, you wouldn't want to link to a spammy site. 

 #5 Link Building: A good site should win these types of links. I have never work on building external links. 

#6 Site Structure: Make all what it needs to have a site easy to navigate. Put your best content in front of the reader, so s/he won't leave the site unhappy. 

 #7 In-Page SEO: Optimize the titles of the pages + it's headers. A good keyword research is still important. You want the search engines find and categorize your site easily. 

 #8 Bounce rate/time-on-site + exit rate/time-on-site: These two factors are the most important. The site metrics can give you some good insights as to how people interact with the site. Identify the weakest part of the site and work on improving it. Forum Discussion WMW 

by, Abhishek Mishra

Free Domain Name Providers

Free Domain Name Providers

http://www.s5network.info – free .com .net .org .info .biz offer

http://www.registerfly.com, www.nucleus.be – free .be offer

http://www.goodluckdomain.in/dotorg.html – free .org offer

http://www.domainsite.com – free .info offer

http://forums.inuration.net – free .com .net .org .info .biz offer

“Almost” domains (domain-like subdomains)

Note: More info on these services will be added soon

yoursite.co.nr www.co.nr

yoursite.biz.ly www.biz.ly

yoursite.net.tc, yoursite.net.ms, etc. www.smartdots.com, www.unonic.com, and www.cydots.com

yoursite.us.tt, yoursite.uk.tt, etc. www.joynic.com

yoursite.int.tl www.int.tl

yoursite.i.am, yoursite.on.to, etc www.v3.com

yoursite.q.la, yoursite.1.vg, etc. www.afraid.org

yoursite.4t.com, yoursite.8k.com, etc. www.freeservers.com

yoursite.b3.nu, etc. www.smartredirect.com

yoursite.com.ru, yoursite.net.ru, etc. www.lifelesspeople.com

yoursite.po.gs www.po.gs

yoursite.da.ru www.da.ru

yoursite.uni.cc www.uni.cc

yoursite———- www———-

yoursite.eu.org www.eu.org – only residents / non-profit orgs. in Europe

yoursite.za.net www.za.net – only residents / organis. in South Africa

by, SEO Guru

Google Penguin Update

Google Penguin Update

Penguin Update (Promote high quality sites while penalizing spammy sites)

The Google update that Matt Cutts first called the “Over Optimization Filter” and then called “Webspam Algorithm” was actually called the “Penguin Update” internally at Google.

Ranking Increase = SquiDoo, Hubpages, BlogSpot, forums, sub domains

Ranking Decrease = Exact match domains, websites with lots of backlink from spun content sources

More specifically this algorithm update will target:

1. Link schemes designed to increase rankings of certain pages or websites

2. Keyword stuffing (High Keyword density, repeating Keywords) used to increase the rankings of a certain page

3. Duplicate content used with the purpose of increasing the size of a website and thus its rankings 

4. Redirects and cloaks used to show one things for users and another for search engines

5. Serving duplicate content from sub-domain 

6. Sending automated queries to Google. 

7. Websites with virus or spam warning (Trojans, website distributing malware)

8. Affiliate Websites with thin content and no value

9. Hidden links and Hidden texts (Black hat SEO practice)

10. SEO over optimization

11. Black hat SEO techniques

12. Paid text links using exact match anchor text

13. Comment spam

14. Guest posts on questionable sites

15. Low-quality article marketing & blog spam 

16. Links from dangerous sites

17. Sponsored Word Press themes, or poor quality reciprocal linking, Paid links or participated in linking forum discussion, blog commenting etc

How to check if your website has been affected by Google Penguin Update?

1. Check your Page Ranking

2. Check your Indexed Pages

3. Check your top landing pages

4. Check your Search Ranking for your Top keywords

5. Monitor your organic traffic

Major difference between Panda and Penguin Updates

1. Panda is a site-wide Penality. If enough pages are tagged as poor, the entire site is just subject to Panda, though some good pages will continue to rank. (To lose the penality, remove or improve poor quality content.)

2. Penguin promotes high quality sites while penalizing spammy sites.

Recovery Tips & Advice

1. Keyword Stuffing

2. Link Schemes –(The links you build should be quality ones, and they should be relevant to your site

3. Duplicate Content (Don’t Post Good Content. Post GREAT content)

4. Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

5. Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

6. Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.

7. Clean up on-page spam 

8. Clean up bad links

9. Don’t create multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

10. Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, Trojans, or other badware.

11. Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

12. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

By, SEO Guru

What Is SEO?

These days, one query often comes in the mind of net user’s - What is SEO ?

By SEO, we mean, Look for Website Search engine optimization and SEO expert is the one who has deeply understanding about the working of Google for offering the more traffic to the sites and leading these to the top level position. The meaning of “What is SEO (Search engine optimization)" is also correlated to the strategy of aiming the primary and secondary keywords by using various ethical methods. There are several names given to the SEO expert.

Coming to the back links, this is a web link of a web page that is linked with the other website. The WebPages displaying more back links with quality articles or content appears at a higher position. Links concerned with authorities like fitness- specialist has extra detailed information as compared to those who are commenting on the fitness programs.

Back links helps to add more details and create it quality oriented. You can also add back links to your blog; this would create your site more useful and well-known. If you want to add back links to your blog site, you will need back link service or back-link tool. Second method to involve back links is to reference appropriate sites. You can provide your blog site with two kinds - of back links that are Relevant and Related.

It is well-known that you link your blog site with Related and relevant back links. You can insert and have the links with Forums of SEO (Search engine optimization). These are also known as a bulletins board, web forums. There are many benefits of using the Search engine optimization forum.

A forum is not just for fun, but it involves webmasters, professional Look for Website Optimization. If these professionals are examining your site, you would get useful reviews from them and have chance to increase your website performances.

Next comes your SEO forums, these specializes in offering better proving floor for a new search engine optimizer. It also useful marketing tool for starting. It is a fact that a new search engine optimizer will certainly learn from excellent SEO Forums.

There are many ways to recognize between good SEO forum and bad SEO forum.

A Good SEO forum will have several followers and much variety of competitive participants. Good webmaster forums have many participants and not the some members. It is so because, becoming a member of a forum is simple but publishing your articles and getting appropriate reaction needs a side against your competitors.

Next way by which you can judge a forum is to look for its count and diversity of threads and locations offered by it. If any search engine optimizer forum has two or three subjects and few locations, it will hardly be discovered by anyone, and there will be fewer participants. However, on the other hand, if that forum SEO or webmaster forums provides a lot of subjects for conversation, then more variety of customers will be a part of the forum. Including some fun forums also does a wonderful deal of work.

By, SEO Guru

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research is the most important part if you are going to build a website. If you know what users are searching for, you know what kind of topics cover to target when you create content or showcase products for the website. Keyword research discovers this information for you.

You should realize that user search queries trends change after a while, so it is a excellent idea to refresh your keyword data on a usual list.

Ideally, the KP’s tool should allow simple, fast access to complete data. Numerous tools exist today on the web to help you for perform this work, and they range from simple online services to products supplied by the search engines themselves. You require to recognize your needs before you choose a tool, as well. If you know your seasonality, it will help inform the selection of keyword research tools. Some keyword research tools only show you 30 day data. While this may seem like enough, be advised that if not you track the keyword data manually, you may imagine seasonal terms have extra traffic than they truly do. Vacation related searches point at various times, and a keyword research tool only showing the past 30 days data this may be very short a window to really show you the yearly trend(Search Queries). Main thing is you could end up thinking there’s many of traffic on a term, when that traffic only occurs once per year.

Other keyword research tools show you around one year of data, which is an excellent way to flatten seasonal trends (Search Queries) and help you to see what a longer time of user data looks like.

As mentioned, some keyword research tools are third party; while others keyword research tools are direct form the search engines themselves. These keyword research tools  offer an excellent way to gain insight via trusted resources, though you should keep in mind that even these keyword tools represent only a snapshot of the true number of searches users do on any given phrase or word.

Every keyword tool should be capable of to presenting you not only data on exactly what you asked for, but also data on related key phrases to the one you inquired about. Your chosen keyword research tool or keyword analysis tool should allow you to export your data so you can manipulate it on your own time.

Finally, it is very important to know that if you use a variety of keyword analysis tools, you will observe a range of results. This is because of the sources of the data, obviously. The main point here is to keep in mind to treat this data as a keyword search trend. If you graphed the numbers shown between keyword analysis tools, the graphs should be approximately the same. You should be focused on the trend (keyword search trend), which points to the most searched on phrases, rather than the complete numbers shown in any keyword research tool.

Keyword Research Tool List:

Microsoft Advertising Keyword Research Tool – (It’s an excel plugin – super simple to install and use.)

Yahoo Clues – cool tool from Yahoo

YouTube offers us their tool for researching keywords and phrases

Google’s Keyword Research Tool – be careful with the settings to get best results

Google Insights

Google Trends

SEOBook’s Keyword Tool – requires at least a free account

Keyword Discovery – requires a free account; to see deeper data, you must pay

WordTracker’s Free Keyword Tool – requires you to pay to see deeper data

Tag Crowd – cool tool

Keyrow – very cool

Hittail keyword tool – Great tool if you are active with managing your content and mapping to targeted keywords.

contributed by, SEO Guru

Internet Advertising And Advantages

The Advantages of Marketing On Web

Advertising is the basic behind promoting a used product or a used service. Marketing is making people know about it by various promotional means. The basic objective is to raise awareness first & then induce customers and clients to buy the product or get registered for the new service.

On web you can announce the launch of a product or a service- hence WWW forms the platform for web marketing.

* Speed in Information Changes- fine tuning of information is tremendous quick. You can add, delete & revise Content everytime you like.

* Cost-Effective-You can make in a whole lot of information at a reasonable cost. This helps in mass media marketing.

* Interactivity- users can take active participation in online marketing campaigns. You can check, you can submit your query & don plenty of other things with online marketing.

What's the basic difference of Web marketing with its traditional counterpart?

Another negative factor about traditional mode of marketing is that when a customer asks for a. literature before opting for the product, he's to wait for a substantial amount of time before receiving the correspondence. But marketing on web is simple  and easy; with click of the mouse the product literature is right in front of your eyes, no matter wherever you are & in which time zone you are.

Traditional ways to communicate with audience or clients is through tv, radio & print media like newspapers & magazines, through telephonic conversation. But these are time-consuming process. Marketing on Web is the quickest way to promote a product or service. In a jiffy, you can connect to millions of potential customers worldwide.

Online marketing with its 24×7 promotional advantage has definitely a niche over its slot-based conventional counterpart. You can promote & convey your message without any hassle.

Moreover, print media is an expensive option. In case you require to add or edit statements, information & news about the product or service you require to go for fresh round of printing manuals, brochures & leaflets. This leads to wastage of time, resources and money. But the web option is a money-saver. As an admin you can make the changes as quick as feasible. Not this, you do not must read the whole stud because all matters related to the thing promoted has been organized under varied classification. For example you might have an interest about Feature & not in a Company History's you can make your choice & read what you exactly like. Click on the links & read only pages that interest you.

Last but not the least, they marketing or web marketing ought to go hand in hand with exiting traditional way of marketing. The way to connect the is to put your company web-site address in print ads, radio channels & TV adverts. Nowadays even the Facebook & Twitter account address is also listed because social media marketing is on the rise in the business world.

By, SEO Guru "Abhishek Mishra"

Google Search Results Now Include Concert Dates

Are you one of those people who seems to always find out about concerts just a bit too late? If so, then I've got good news for you: Google will now automatically list relevant concert dates when you search for your favorite musicians.

As Kavi Goel, a Google product manager, explains in a blog post, Google search results conveniently now include upcoming concert tour dates right under an artist's official website. The tour dates are listed only if the artist will be appearing near your location within the next few months through, so no worries about having search results flooded with distracting data about distant concerts.

The upcoming concert date information is aggregated from several different websites and comes with links which will allow you to purchase tickets. No fuss, no muss.

Now the only thing that's missing is a button which will dispatch a Google employee who'll camp out in front of tour buses in order to collect autographs for you.

By, Internet Marketing Guru

SEO Tips And Strategies

Search Engine Optimization Tips And Strategies

1. Stay Focused – You want to focus on as narrow a niche as possible. When you have a more narrowly focused website then the traffic you receive is more likely to generate sales.

2. Use Accurate Descriptive Keywords – One of the most crucial elements of your SEO work is keyword analysis. Your keywords being used within your content is very effective in being competitive with other sites.

3. No Grammatical/Spelling Errors – Poor spelling and grammar mistakes will cause people to think your site is unprofessional. Nobody wants to read through a bunch of mistakes.

4. Logical Website Navigation – Whenever you build your site you need to keep smooth navigation in mind. Easy navigation keeps people on your site. You need to use descriptive titles, improved usability, and local indexing. Visitors that have a hard time finding what they came for will not stay long.

5. Link Strategies – Many people link to just any site they can. This is wrong. The quality of your links is just as important as the number. One good link outweighs fifty poor ones.

6. Accurate Title Tags – Be sure your title tags are accurate and definitely contain your main keywords. The things surfers can find on your site needs to be exactly described in your title tag.

7. Accurate Description Tags – Your descriptive page title should summarize your pages using your best keywords in them. Your visitors are going to see your description tag mainly because it is used in the listing. Always highlight a benefit to get your page chosen.

8. Minimal Advertising – Keep advertisement down to a minimum. Banners and popups can be distracting and annoying.

9. About Page – People trust your more if you add an About Page. They feel more at ease with someone who is willing to open up and be friendly.

10. Privacy Policy – Many viewers actually look for this mainly because it makes good business sense.

11. Good Color Coordination – On your home page your should use light soft colors as much as you can, and you need to use two to three basic tones.

12. Sitemap – Always include a sitemap. It improves your visibility and will get your indexed quicker by the search engines.

All these things will help you to set up your site the right way and make it a pleasant experience for your visitors. If you stick with these techniques you will have happy and returning customers coming to your site.

Contributed By SEO Guru

What is SOPA/PIPA?

What is SOPA PIPA?

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), also known as H.R. 3261 is a bill that was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011. The bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.*

Similar to SOPA, the PROTECT IP Act or S.968, (PIPA) establishes a system for taking down websites that the DoJ determines to be "dedicated to infringing activities." In some cases, action could be taken to block sites without first allowing the alleged infringer to defend themselves in court.**

As artists, inventors, educators, writers, creators, and dedicated citizens, we believe in the importance of protecting individuals' intellectual property, but these bills are too broad and go far beyond addressing issues of internet piracy. If passed, they will infringe on First Amendment rights, enable Internet censorship, weaken Internet security, destroy jobs and cripple the Internet.

Open letters in protest of SOPA/PIPA have been written to Congress from some of the most influential and important members of the internet community including the founders of Google, Twitter, Flickr, Yahoo!, The Huffington Post, LinkedIn, Youtube, Paypal, Craigslist, eBay, Wikipedia, Blogger, and a group of eighty-three engineers instrumental in the creation of the internet, to name a few.

by, SEO Guru

Google Search Algorithm Updates

Google Updates Algorithm

Google has freshened up its search results with updated algorithms.

The updates could be an important part of Google’s strategy to keep ahead of search rivals like Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing engine, analysts said. The tweak in the basic Google algorithm should make search results much more timely for users, Google said, adding that about 35 percent of all searches should be affected.

“If I search for ‘Olympics,’ I probably want information about next summer’s upcoming Olympics, not the 1900 Summer Olympics (the only time my favourite sport, cricket, was played),” wrote Google Fellow Amit Singhal in a blog post.

Needs Freshness

“Google Search uses a freshness algorithm, designed to give you the most up-to-date results, so even when I just type ‘Olympics’ without specifying 2012, I still find what I’m looking for,” he added. Singhal, though, noted that not all searches are based on finding the most recent results.

For instance, someone trying to look up their favourite marinara recipe has different needs than someone trying to find information on the latest happenings with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Therefore, the ‘significant’ improvement to Google’s search algorithm can determine when to give users the more timely results, Singhal said. “Different searches have different freshness needs,” wrote Singhal. “This algorithmic improvement is designed to better understand how to differentiate between these kinds of searches and the level of freshness you need, and make sure you get the most up-to-the minute answers.

‘Updates Necessary’

“Such updates are necessary if Google expects to maintain its dramatic lead in the search market, according to Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group. “Google needs to continue to refine search in order to maintain its top-dog status,” Olds said. “Bing isn’t a huge threat at this point, but the Bingers are hungry and aren’t going to go away. They’re busy working on their own enhancements. It’s trench warfare and Google has to keep pushing ahead. Search is Google’s bread and butter, the foundation of its entire empire.”

The timing of the update could prove beneficial to Google, whose market share numbers are starting to show intermittant signs of slippage.

‘Bad News For Bing’

In August, the s earch giant’s US market share slipped below 65 percent for the first time in two months. It was a quick dip, though. According to comScore, an internet tracker,  Google inched back from 64.8 percent in August to 65.3 percent in September. Nonetheless, the dip below 65 percent should be a reminder to Google that it needs to make sure its technology stays ahead of the competition. While analysts have long said that users are mostly comfortable with Google today, an updated Bing could start to look ‘cooler’ and some users might start to stray.

“Google’s new search algorithm is a nice, albeit modest, advance,” said Olds.

“They’ve obviously analysed how users are interacting with links after their initial search – which links people select, which links they don’t, and their follow-up searches. Google has used these results to enhance what they’re serving up. It’s not a huge blow to Bing, but it shows that Google is continuing to hone its flagship product,” Olds added.

What Happiness In 60 Seconds Online

What Happiness In 60 Seconds Online...

What Happiness In 60 Seconds Online

• 694,445 queries on Google

• 6,600+ pictures uploaded to Flickr

• 600 videos uploaded on YouTube

• 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments on Facebook

• 70 domain registrations

• 168,000,000+ emails sent

• 320 new accounts on Twitter and 98,000 tweets

• 13,000 downloads of iPhone apps

• 20,000 new posts on Tumblr

• 50 new Wordpress installations

• 125 Wordpress plugin downloads

• 100 new accounts on LinkedIn

• 40 new questions on Yahoo! Answers

• 1,200+ new ads on Craigslist

• 370,000+ minutes of voice calls on Skype

• 13,000+ hours of music streaming on Pandora

It's a crazy, crazy world out there...!
by, SEO Guru

A Guide To Meta Name="Robots"

A Guide To Meta Name="Robots"

The meta tags for robots you can have on your pages have been around for quite a while. Search engines have slowly been adding features to it. This page lists an overview of all the different values you can have in your tag. First, the official syntax:

1	<meta name="robots" value=" <value> ">

The Different Robots Meta Tag Values

An explanation of all the different values you can use in the robots meta tags:

index

Allow search engines robots to index the page, you don't have to add this to your pages, as it's the default.

noindex

Disallow search engines from showing this page in their results.

none

This is a shortcut for noindex,nofollow, or basically saying to search engines: don't do anything with this page at all.

follow

Tells the search engines robots to follow the links on the page, whether it can index it or not.

nofollow

Tells the search engines robots to not follow any links on the page at all.

noarchive

Prevents the search engines from showing a cached copy of this page.

nocache

Same as noarchive, but only used by MSN/Live.

nosnippet

Prevents the search engines from showing a snippet of this page in the search results and prevents them from caching the page.

noodp

Blocks search engines from using the description for this page in DMOZ (aka ODP) as the snippet for your page in the search results.

noydir

Blocks Yahoo! from using the description for this page in the Yahoo! directory as the snippet for your page in the search results. No other search engines use the Yahoo! directory for this purpose, so they don't support the tag.

The Resources From The Search Engines

The search engines themselves have pages about this subject as well:

• Google did a blogpost on the Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Live has a site owner help page for it
• You can search Yahoo!'s Webmaster resources
• Ask.com has some info about it in it's Webmaster resource page

And of course there's always the official robots.txt pages and Danny Sullivan's big robots meta write up.

Which Search Engine Supports Which Robots Meta Tag Values?

This table shows which search engines supports which values:

Robots value	Google	Yahoo!	MSN / Live	Ask
index	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
noindex	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
none	Yes	Doubt	Doubt	Yes
follow	Yes	Doubt	Doubt	Yes
nofollow	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
noarchive	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
nosnippet	Yes	No	No	No
noodp	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
noydir	No use	Yes	No use	No use

You can block all robots at once by the markup above, or just block one robot by specifying it specifically:

Google GOOGLEBOT

Yahoo! SLURP

MSN / Live MSNBOT

Ask TEOMA

Contributed by SEO Guru

SEO Bing Webmaster Tools

SEO Bing Webmaster Tools

What's New in updating Bing Webmaster tools? Lots. Redesigned user interface Bing adds new ways for search engines to find information they want quickly and easily. Here are some key features and enhancements Bing Webmaster account users will see:

* Crawl delay configurable by the hour - Control when and at what pace Bing crawls your website

* User and role management - Control who can access your Bing Webmaster account and what functions they can use

* Index Explorer – Improvements to reliability and how fast data appears in your reports.

Freshness

Performance

Extensibility

Reduced machine footprint

Stability and failure detection

New sites will have Index Explorer data the moment they sign up

* URL Normalization – Manage which URLs from your site Bing holds in its index

* Deep Links Management – Manage which deep links are shown for your website, when your domain is selected

Bing Webmaster Self Help Guides & Technical Documents

Updated and improved features Bing Webmaster Tools are backed by more than 40 very detailed and useful self-help guides as to the documents. Documentation of self-help videos include information on managing your site at the rate of Bing, link building, standardization, and implementation redirects new fragments rich in newly launched site schema.org society.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via natural search results (organic or algorithmic). Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher range, the searchers will visit that site.

Bing Webmaster Tools aims to help webmasters optimize their content, showing them how to crawl and index Bing your site, and users see the click through rate of your results pages Bing for a variety of terms search. Here is a list of some that the self-help guides and how-to documents:

* Using Bing Webmaster Tools

* Webmaster Tools Data explained

* How to perform Link Building

* Removing or blocking pages from our index

* Search Engine Optimization (SEO) guidance

* Using the tag

* Managing URL parameters

* Implementing Rich Snippets (www.schema.org)

* Managing Canonicalization (duplicate content)

* Using the tag

* Managing redirects

* 404 page management

* Rich Media and Search

Bing Optimization

Bing recommends website owners should focus more on On-Page SEO instead of off page SEO. Webmasters are encouraged to work on the quality of content and site architecture. Here is the list of things you should think to start optimizing your site.

1. Verify your site and make sure BingBot is allowed to crawl your site.

2. Check your HTML code. Be sure that all paired tags are closed, and that all links direct to the correct page, and use W3C Markup Validation Service.

3. Keep your URLs simple and static, as complicated URLs are difficult to index as link destinations, & URLs that don’t change are readily indexed and eaily remembered by readers.

4. Use a broken links checker. If your blog contains broken links, BingBot won’t index your site effectively and fewer visitors will be able to reach your content.

5. Only use text and links that are visible to users.

6. Do not use techniques, such as link farms, to artificially increase the number of links to your site.

7. Do not attempt to increase a webpage’s keyword density by adding numerous irrelevant words and or tags.

8. If you move any page be sure set up the original URL to redirect people to the new webpage. (301 permanent or temporary 302)

If you don’t have a current account, you can easily sign-up and register your site to begin using the new Bing Webmaster Tools.

Bing Webmaster Tools– Sign in and view how Bing handles your site, validate ownership, analyze statistics and see who links to you.
Bing Webmaster Toolbox to see the new features in your account, and to access the new content.
contributed by, SEO Blog

Ways To Build Your Brand Value

Ways To Build Your Brand Value
Building your brand value online requires time, dedication and patience. However, that intangible asset that is brand equity can go a long way in building and maintaining an online reputation, building your trust factor with search engines and consumers, helping increase online brand presence and more. Brand value is not something that just happens. It takes a conscious effort on your part to ensure that its brand value becomes a valuable asset.

Here Are Three Ways To Help Build Your Brand Value 
Invest In Content Marketing

Marketing of a good content should try to educate the consumer, not just be a sales pitch for your product. Consumers do not care how wonderful your company is, just know what you can do for them. How does your product to solve your problem? Content marketing is the way to position itself as the solution. By producing quality content (which could be anything, including videos, blogs, white papers, and more) that is establishing itself as an industry expert. The more confident you are (search engines and consumers), the best heritage of the brand. 

Cultivate Relationships With Industry Bloggers  Obviously, a great piece of content that will do much good if you can not get any eye on it. That's where influential bloggers can provide a great benefit to your marketing campaign content. A popular industry blog can reach thousands of unique visitors a day and messages can get shared across a variety of social networking sites hundreds of times. Some blogs allow you to post the guest speakers, a great place to build your portfolio link. If you can develop a good relationship with a popular blogger, you may be asked to become a regular writer for your blog. It may also be willing to write a post to promote your business. It is a reliable source of information by your target audience. Having a powerful blogger support your company not only builds brand value can also help drive a huge amount of traffic to your site.

Build An Online Community  There is no doubt that socially and SEO crossroads and influence others. The three major social networks Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but there are plenty of small and niche social networking sites where you can develop an online community. The more followers you have on Twitter (preferably active accounts operated by human beings, not robots), most likely your Tweets are retweeted. More Facebook fans, most people that your brand can interact with every day. LinkedIn is a great place for lead generation, and to share content across the LinkedIn Groups. Their connections to spend their content throughout its connections and later spreading its brand and content so far.

contributed by, SEO Blog

Your Blog Is Your Brand

Your Blog Is Your Brand Social Media Branding

In the online world of today, social media brand has become so important for you to project the right image to your prospects and customers. In this article I will talk about a tool you can use to promote their own brand and really get a lot of traffic and revenue drivers.

I can talk to many people and are really missing a beat with this and really understand the power of using this tool to brand themselves online. The tool I'm talking about is a blog, or rather his own blog hosted.

Using a blog as part of its social media strategy is a powerful way to promote your brand on the Internet. Your brand can be anything you want it to be, perhaps, and SEO Expert, or a boss, or a golfer or anything you can think of and want to share your knowledge with the world.

Social media is used by all people in all walks of life to promote almost anything. A blog is the basis of the social media strategy, so you need to know how to use one that is effective for the brand social media.

• The blog must be hosted himself and for good reason, you want ability to publish whatever you want to your blog. Want to be able to sell anything you want and change what you want. In short, your own shop in the building itself and the ground is at. Go to a free choice and your rent as a store, the building owner can do whatever they want with it without warning.

• You must be configured blog for SEO for Google can rank high for your keywords to go after. To be posting links on social networking sites, but that is only short term. In the long term wants to sit on page 1 with a number of jobs.

• To set up your blog so that the reader has the option to join your mailing list multiply. You can do this by adding links to images, using the contact forms and emerging forms, having a strong call to action and links within the message itself.

• Since we are talking about social media, you want your readers to easily share your content to social networking sites and there are plenty of plugins or applications that allow you to do that.

• And you must help people to contact you by leaving your Skype name, phone number and add a contact form. If people can not get hold of you who think you have something to hide.

Now if you think of all the major brands using social media, they all use the items in the list above. It's part of what makes the brand they are, in addition to offering a great product or service. Try it and you will connect to Facebook and Twitter, which will contact form, it will be easy to find in Google and most challenging will be the site owner they are.

Social media brand is so important for any company large or small, is even more important for online marketing to get the right to stand out from the 1000 other people online. Having a blog will start in the right direction.

contributed by, SEO Blog

Removing 404-Errors from Google Index

Removing 404-Errors from Google Index

Everyone has seen them, and it is likely that nearly every webmaster has experienced the dreaded 404-Error page. These pages often result from moving to a new URL without making sure any redirection is specified for the old URL (which stays in the SERPs).

If your domain has too many 404 Errors floating around in the search engines a few things may happen:

* Your site’s reputation may be hurt.

* Your site’s rankings may suffer.

* Your site may be penalized.

* Your site may be banned from the index.

As you see, a 404-Error page is truly a sick-and-twisted killer of SEO campaigns. It is likely that this SEO Serial Killer has compiled an SEO Campaign death toll in the 1,000,000s. Therefore, they must be stopped!!!

However, before I send you on your mission to assassinate any and all of your domain’s 404-Errors, you must first understand your enemy…!

The 404-Error Defined!

The 404 or Not Found error message is an HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and did not reveal the reason why.

404-Errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server could not be made at all.

Remove 404 Pages from Google’s Index

Your mission is to kill all 404-Error pages to your site. Despite how ominous of a task this might seem, removing a 404-Error page is actually very easy.

Step #1: Set Up In Google Webmaster Tools

To start the process, make sure you’re site is being tracked in Google Webmaster Tools so that it can report back any potential site quality issues (such as the 404 pages we’re hunting). Tracking can be established via the use of a META Tag that is given to each site in the Webmaster account.

For instance, mine looks like this:

Step #2: Finding Your 404-Error Pages

Once you have entered your site in Google Webmaster and verified, you will be able to see a high-level overview of your site’s diagnostics via the admin panel.

From there, you will be able to see your ‘Not Found’ link details. If you click the ‘details’ link, you will see a comprehensive list of your site’s current 404-Error pages. Hint: Copy and paste all the URLs into a Word Doc for quick access.

Step #3: Killing Your 404-Error Pages

Now that you’ve found your site’s current 404-Error pages, it’s time to kill them. To do this, we need to submit them for removal from Google’s Index. To do that click ‘Tool’ and then use the ‘Remove URL’ Tool.

Click ‘New Removal Request’ and you will then be given 4 options:

* Individual URLs: web pages, images, or other files.

* A directory and all subdirectories on your site.

* Your entire site Remove your site from appearing in Google search results.

* Cached copy of a Google search result

For our purposes, select the first option. From here, you will be able to submit a URL for removal.

Copy and paste in the relative URL path of your 404-Error page and click ‘Add’. Repeat this process until all of your 404-Error pages have been added to your list of URLs to remove. Once you’ve completed you list, be sure to hit ‘Submit Removal Request’.

Hint: You can remove a maximum of 100 page per request, and requests usually take 3-5 days to process. Be sure to monitor the progress as this tool can be buggy.

Step #4: Consider Other Options

If you still have access on your server to the old URLs that may be causing 404 errors, it would be a sound strategy to put a 301-Redirect in place.

That way, whenever a user finds the page in the SERPs, they will automatically be redirected to a working page. It’s up to you which page to redirect them to. With time, the new URL will replace the old one in the SERPs.

In addition, it is also a good idea to create custom 404 pages. This will make sure a user doesn’t feel lost when he or she finds a 404-Error page, it may promote interactivity with the site even though a user has every right to simply leave, and it may give them a way out via links back to relevant pages on your site.

Hope this helps you… SEO Blog