Dec 29, 2010

10 New Google Products We Want to See in 2011

· Google + 1

Google Me. Emerald Sea, Emerald City. Google + 1, as Google's social network initiative is currently called, is supposed to be the big challenger to Face book. Instead, Google CEO Eric CEO Eric Schmidt said Google is building layers of social tools throughout Google's Web services. We've been talking about it since summer 2011. Now we want to see it.


· Contextual Discovery

Serendipitous Search. Autonomous Search. Contextual Discovery is Google geo local chief Marissa Mayer's latest term for search that targets mobile phone users on the go. Mayer, pictured here, said at Le Web: "Take a user's location as a piece of context for finding what they want without them actually searching for anything. We have a couple of things we're experimenting with, but it will be out in    the next year." Privacy must be included.


· Google Fiber

We've been greatly anticipating this launch since Google unveiled its project in February 2010. Google Fiber is Google's bid to launch a blazingly fast 1G-Bps mesh network in a community or several communities to test for free. Ideally, this will help Google build new, fast and better applications for the Web. A successful deployment could be a goldmine for Google and communities. Given the importance of this endeavor, Google has delayed its choice of community until 2011.

· Chrome OS


Yes, Chrome OS has been released to open source since 2009. And yes, Google launched a pilot program for the Web operating system this month with the release of thousands of Cr-48 test machines. But the company missed its 2010 holiday deadline for shipping official Chrome OS machines. Those are forthcoming from Samsung and Acer in 2011. We can't wait to see how they do in a market rapidly being saturated by tablets such as Apple's iPad and Google Android tablets.

· Google Tablet


To that end, 2010 saw the release of two Google-branded smart phones, the Nexus One and the newly arrived Nexus S, which we just reviewed. Now that Apple has almost single-handedly defined the tablet market for Samsung and the rest, we want to see a Google-branded tablet computer based on the forthcoming Android 3.0 Honeycomb OS. Maybe it's this Motorola machine Android head Andy Rubin showed off this month. Or maybe Google wants to launch a Chrome OS tablet to accompany its Cr-48 notebook. We think a Google-branded tablet with the latest Google software could play well as an iPad alternative.


· Augmented Reality Using Street View


In a conversation with eWEEK, Google Maps creator John Hanke mentioned that Google really wants to jazz up its Street View feature. Specifically, he mentioned the augmented reality technology of Layar, which could be used to enhance the information provided to consumers in Street View. Sounds like a match made in heaven to us.



· Google Voice—Everywhere

Google tweaked Google Voice to enable calls to mobile and landline phones in Gmail this summer. In the true spirit of the network, it would be great if Google laced Voice capabilities throughout all of its Web services. Imagine working on a document on Google Docs then clicking a button to initiate a call to discuss it with a team member. 

· Google Apps Goes Social

 Google Apps should get some enhanced social functionality. Take the same Google Docs example. Instead of just being able to e-mail a document, you can blast it out to folks on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. This could be part of or independent of the Google + 1 efforts. But it would be fun to broadcast some Apps content to popular social network services. 

 

· Google Instant Expansion


We love Google Instant predictive search, and that it's now available on mobile devices. But now that Google has set the bar so high, we want Instant functionality across all of Google's searchable properties, including Images, Maps and YouTube. 







· Google TV Double Down

Many believe Google launched a half-baked Google TV product. We think the $300 price for Logitech Review, $400 for Sony Blu-ray players and $1,000+ for Sony Internet TVs biased a lot of our media colleagues. Sure, the product can get better and it already is. The Netflix app on Google TV is becoming more than just a dumb app, and the search capabilities are being improved. But we want Google to spend some of that $33 billion in cash on striking partnerships to get Google TV on all networks and Websites. That means making sure Chrome is compatible with many Websites, too.

Dec 27, 2010

Types of Redirection

Types of Redirection
* 301 Redirect 
This is the most SEO friendly redirect. It is actually a web server function that redirects the visitor of the current page to the new page and returns a response code that says the original site has been permanently moved to the new location. Search engines identify the redirection is very easy and credit of the new URL with all the back links and PageRank of the old URL. This type of diversion is expected to have any influence on search rankings. 
Example:
JavaScript Redirect ( NOT RECOMMENDED !! )
JavaScript redirection is another common form of client side redirection however it is not at all recommended from SEO perspective. In most cases the search engines would simply ignore trhe JavaScript and stay on the current phase. In most cases JavaScript redirects are not looked upon as a favorable practice as this technique has been massively misused by certain industries. The common trick was to have a keyword stuffed pages redirecting to the actual page in 0 seconds. The search engines would not be able to read the JS and index the keyword stuffed pages where as the visitors would be redirected to the actual page by the JavaScript. Search engines today are smart enough to detect this ploy and you can run into deep trouble if you are trying to utilize this.
Option 1
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
window.location = "http://www.newurl.com/"
//-->
</script>

Option 2

<body onLoad="setTimeout(location.href='http://www.newurl.com', '0')" >

Once again, JavaScript Redirect is Not Recommended from SEO Perspective.



Server Side Redirection

301 Redirection in PHP
The code below should be added at the top of the page.
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://www.newurl.com");
exit();

301 Redirection in ASP ( VB Script ) 
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.newurl.com"
response.end
%>

301 Redirection in ASP ( JScript )
The function below is dependent on the default feature of IIS 5 and above, where “Response.Buffer = true;” is set by default.This should be set before the function is called else it will cause errors.
function PermanentRedirect(strDestinationUri) {
Response.Clear();
Response.Status = 301;
Response.AddHeader("Location", strDestinationUri);
Response.Flush();
Response.End();
}
"strDestinationUri" should be an absolute URL for maximum client compatibility.

301 Redirection in ASP.Net ( C# )
<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.newurl.com");
}
</script>

301 Redirection in Cold Fusion ( CFM )
<.cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<.cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.newurl.com">

301 Redirection in JSP / JAVA
<%
response.setStatus(301);
response.setHeader( "Location", "http://www.newurl.com" );
response.setHeader( "Connection", "close" );
%>

* 302 Redirect 
A 302 redirect should be used when you want to redirect visitors to a new page for the time period. Is a function of web server that redirects visitors to the original page to a new page and send a response code that says the page was temporarily moved to the new location. Search engines often have difficulty deciding on how to treat this type of redirection, can actually affect your search ranking. It is advisable to try to avoid the 302 redirect as much as possible (unless it is really a temporary measure). 

* Meta Redirect 
This is a client side function done using the Meta-refresh tag. Traditionally it was believed that use of Meta-refresh tag might lead to penalty or ban from the search engines because of the immense misuse of this feature by several sites that served a keyword rich optimized page to the search engines and then redirected the users to the actual page. However, as per recent updates it seems search engines are a little better in handling this type of redirects but the concern is most of them are having a different policy on how they treat this redirects. Most of them though treat this as a form of 302 redirection and hence it is not at all recommended, if you have SEO in mind.

Though there is no official statement from Google , from the word of mouth information it appears that they treat a Meta redirect as 302 redirection. Yahoo however, has clearly outlined there policy about handling redirections, stating that they treat Meta redirects set to 0 seconds ("little or no delay") as 301 redirection and anything above 0 seconds ("noticeable delay")is treated as a 302 redirection. MSN does not drop the original URL from their index on adding the Meta Refresh tag but also indexes the new URL, which indicates that they are treating Meta Redirection as 302 redirect.

Example:

Meta Redirect ( Using Meta Refresh Tag)
<META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="0; URL=http://www.newurl.com">
Add this line in between <head></head> of your webpage to redirect that page in 0 seconds to http://www.newurl.com. You can increase the delay in redirection by changing "0" to some other value. Remember to replace http://www.newurl.com with the actual URL of your new page.

How To Implement 301 Redirection / Website redirection
Redirection can be implemented at two levels. Server Side redirection can be either a 301 redirection or a 302 redirection, however, as 301 redirection is the most search engine friendly method, I have explained the 301 redirection only in this article.
Choose wisely mentioned above code
Redirection scripts are extremely important and can be very helpful if applied properly not just for 301 redirection or URL canonicalization issues but also to resolve several situation specific problems. In all cases server level redirections should be the first option and client side redirection should be considered in cases only when you do not have control over your server.

SEO Quiz

SEO Quiz

I thought it might be fun to put together an SEO Quiz.
How many of the following can you get right?

1. Stanford University’s Page Rank is named after?
a. Ranking Web Pages    b. Satchel Page  c. Larry Page  d. The Palo Alto Gradient Evaluation
e. None of the above
 
Ans: c. Larry Page – PageRank is named after Larry Page, who is the inventor listed on the original PageRank patent.


2. Which of the following search engine crawling models has not been proposed in either an academic paper or patent for emulating how people might visit web pages?
a. Random Surfer  b. Rowdy Surfer  c. Cautious Surfer   d. Reasonable Surfer  e. None of the above
 
Ans:. b. Rowdy Surfer –
The Random Surfer makes an appearance in the 1998s paper The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, by Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd. A Random Surfer might click on any link that it finds on a page at random, with a chance that it might leave the page completely at any time.
The Cautious Surfer comes into attention in the WWW2007 poster, A Cautious Surfer for PageRank (pdf) by Lan Nie, Baoning Wu, and Brian Davidson. It’s described more fully in Incorporating Trust into Web Search (pdf). If a cautious surfer believes that a page it is on is trustworty, it is more likely to follow links from that page. If it feels that the page is untrustworthy, it might leave and go to a random (and more trustworthy) page.
The Reasonable Surfer is described in Google’s patent Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data. My post Google’s Reasonable Surfer: How the Value of a Link May Differ Based upon Link and Document Features and User Data is an attempt to describe how the Reasonable Surfer might operate. A reasonable surfer is more likely to click on some links it finds on a page than others, and the patent describes a set of features about links, the page the links are on, and the pages that the links point to, that might be considered when deciding which page a person might click on next.
I’m not sure what a rowdy surfer would do.

3. Which company wasn’t started by two students who walked away from finishing their degrees.
a. Google  b. Yahoo  c. Microsoft  d. Ask.com  e. None of the above
 
Ans: d. Ask.com
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who both left Stanford before completing their Ph.D. degrees.
Yahoo’s two founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo, left their doctoral programs at Stanford after faced with success at Yahoo.
Microsoft’s Paul Allen and Bill Gates didn’t leave their degree programs at the same time, but both jumped into business before collecting their diplomas. Bill Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard, and never looked back. Paul Allen left Washington State University after two years to work as a programmer, and soon after talked Bill Gates into starting Micro-soft.
Ask was founded by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, who are both alumni of UC San Diego.

4. Which of the following is not a Microsoft search ranking algorithm?
a. fRank     b. Ranknet     c. Trustrank   d. Poprank   e. None of the above

 
Ans:  c. Trustrank
Both Yahoo and Google have dibs on an algorithm known as Trustrank, or in Google’s case “Trust Rank.” Yahoo’s originates in research between Stanford University and Yahoo, which resulted in the paper Combating Web Spam with TrustRank (pdf), and describes how web spam pages might be identified on the Web. A Google patent, Search result ranking based on trust defines trust ranks for entities (people, companies, etc.) who create labels or annotations for documents found on the web.
There are a few different places where Microsoft describes Ranknet and fRank, but one good place to learn more about them is the paper Beyond PageRank: Machine Learning for Static Ranking (pdf)
Poprank is a way of ranking “objects” found on the Web from Microsoft, and is described in the paper Object Level Ranking: Bringing Order to Web Objects (pdf)

5. Google’s Local Search algorithm probably doesn’t use:
a. Location Prominence   b. Location Sensitivity  c. Location Awareness  d. Location Confidence
e. None of the above

Ans: d. Location Confidence
The other choices are from Google patent filings that describe aspects of how Google may be looking at different features related to local search and how businesses at specific locations might rank for queries in Google Local. For definitions for all three, see my Google Local Search Glossary

6. Which of the following pagerank algorithms is from Microsoft?
a. Topic Sensitive Pagerank   b. PigeonRank  c. Block Level PageRank  d. User Sensitive PageRank
e. None of the above
 
Ans: c. Block Level PageRank
The sources for the others: Topic Sensitive Pagerank (pdf) – Google’s Taher H. Haveliwala, while at Stanford University, PigeonRank – A Google algorithm, from April 1, 2002. User Sensitive PageRank – a Yahoo patent.  Block Level Page Rank is written about in the Microsoft paper Block-level Link Analysis. It is similar to PageRank, except instead of operating on a page level, it focuses upon segments of pages, or blocks. A single page can have multiple segments, and each can have their own “pagerank.”

7. Which of the following is not a search bot’s name:
a. Gulliver  b. Scooter  c. Jimbob  d. Slurp  e. None of the above

Ans: c. Jimbob
Gulliver – the bot from Northernlight, which once was a public search engine and now develops “Strategic Research Portals.”
Scooter – the name of one of Altavista’s robots
Slurp – the name of Yahoo’s web crawler. Not sure how much more of Slurp we will see now that Microsoft has taken over the search index at Yahoo.
There are a large number of web crawlers, and it’s possible that there may be one out there with the name Jimbob, but I couldn’t find one.

8. Which is not a Real Search Engine Ranking Algorithm?
a. SALSA (Stochastic Approach for Link-Structure Analysis)
b. HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search)
c. SMART (Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique)
d. Hilltop    e. None of the above

Ans: c. SMART (Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique)
Sources for the following:
SALSA (Stochastic Approach for Link-Structure Analysis)
HITS (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search)
Hilltop
There really is a SMART (Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique) process, but it doesn’t involve search engines.

9. Which is not an early name for one of today’s major search engines
a. Backrub   b. Ben and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web   c. Ask Jeeves  d. MSN Search
e. None of the above

Ans: . Ben and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web
OK. Trick question. Backrub became Google, Ask Jeeves removed the “Jeeves,” and MSN search evolved into Windows Live, and now Bing. Yahoo started off as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Ben and Jerry make unique flavored icecreams.

10. Which of the following is not a well known model (in the information retrieval field) for information seeking:
a. Berry-Picking   b. Information Foraging   c. Sensemaking   d. Orienteering   e. None of the above

Ans: e. None of the above
There’s a really nice description of these different models of information seeking in the book Search User Interfaces, in the chapter Models of the Information Seeking Process. The book is available free online.


Dec 24, 2010

HTML 5 and how it will affect your SEO

Typically every ‘action’ which is the result of a change in web technology has a ‘reaction’ in terms of how it will affect your SEO. HTML5 is the latest HTML standard released by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its implementation has some impact in the way search engines will now index your website. 

HTML5, as you’d expect, has taken advantage of search engine development to help search engines index websites better. Its microdata feature in which you specify vocabulary used in a section of a web page or an article on the page is the perfect example.  That means that you can have multiple microdata vocabularies on a single page.  This helps to better define and organize multiple topics on a single page without being afraid that the content itself is going to confuse search engines. 

This increased intelligence provided to search engines will help you better target customers and deliver your content where it needs to be delivered the most.  By segmenting a page, you can now target multiple customers because the search engines understand and can differentiate between different sections of a page. This makes each page you create more suitable to the complexity of most online business. 

The <section> tag is how you can compartmentalize different segments of your HTML 5 page.  Each section should identify microdata vocabulary that you are using within the segment so that the pages work for you in w away which until now has been almost impossible to achieve properly.

The new <article> tags mark the space within which you will put the majority of the textual content on your page.  Again, a single page can contain multiple articles  and a single article can contain multiple <section> areas.  This nesting structure helps to further organize the content within a page.  If you are a blogger, you will want to use the <article> tabs to segment multiple articles on your pages.

As you guessed by now HTML5 gives particular attention to nesting and tree structures even within a single page and finally updates HTML which was stuck in the 20th century and brings it in line with 21st century web technology. 

The new <header> tag is text to describe a section.  In addition, you can create headers within headers, again creating some nicely organized nested code which will help you if you are working with a funnel effect in your content.  The <header> tag will replace your h1 tags when you convert your code from HTML 4 to HTML 5.

At the end of a section, you can add a <footer> tag.  This tag contains any footer style text about the section such as the Author of the article and any links the article referenced. Strictly speaking this is not new but it is now formally recognized and there is a mark-up tag to cover it. 

The <nav> tag is where you place all of your internal navigation links.  Again, search engines will much more accurately be able to understand the structure of your site if you use this section.  In addition, you should place your "previous" and "next" internal links in this section if your site or blog contains them.

If you are familiar with HTML 4, you'll notice that the new HTML 5 tags we’ve looked at so far were previously handled by various <div> tags in HTML 4.  The <div> tags are add-on elements within HTML 4 that fail on many levels to properly describe the different sections of a web page which then requires a lot more SEO work in order to be indexed properly.

Finally, the new <mark> tag is very similar to the <strong> tag and will likely be used frequently on your site to make certain keywords stand out.

8 SEO Trends need to take seriously in 2011

SEO is one of those areas of online activity which evolves at a speed faster than the relatively easy-going dog years in which time on the web is measured. The cat-and-mouse game which is the norm between search engine optimizers and website owners has accelerated to the point where time is measured in stoat years (which means the ratio has gone from being 1:7 to being 1:32) and this makes it all the more important to be able to look and plan ahead.

But there are still trends you need to keep your eye on and adapt what you are doing to their ever changing importance.

1) Personalized search is only going to grow: On the web immediacy and customization spell out addiction which means that personalized search is a trend which will only get bigger and, inevitably, it will have an impact on SEO. Personalization (a Google and BING staple now) basically throws up a virtual ‘fence’ around the end-user which makes it harder to sites which do not have a solid pedigree to break through. This means that search now favors established websites, branded websites and websites which rely on social network recommendations in order to break through.

2)It’s a two search engine world: The convergence of the Yahoo/BING search has created a two-tiered world in search engines. Google continues to deliver the lion’s share of search results with a nearly 68% share in the US over June 2010 (according to Comscore) which means that worldwide Google continues to be well over the 80% mark. If you are optimizing your site Google is the one to aim for and since they are the market leader anything which works on them will work equally well (if not better) for the Yahoo/BING combination.

3) SEO spend will increase: This is a natural result of both personalized search (see trend #1) and the explosion of social media marketing (see search #4)each of which are taking search away from the automatic semantic web indexing which was the indication at the beginning of 2010 and are now making it an integral part of online marketing and online promotion. This means that unless you are lucky enough to have read and taken heed of SEO Help you really need an expert SEO who will do all the work for you and get your website performing the way it should.

4)Social marketing: Unless your website is on Facebook and Twitter and you are getting mentioned and your URL is passed around in the blogosphere, your company brand is (in the eyes of the search engines) going into a decline. This means that in terms of online presence you really need to have a clearly worked out, sustained and sustainable online marketing strategy which is designed to give you the kind of social marketing presence that will help your brand and search engine positioning.

5) The impact of the real time web is on the increase: Whether you Twitter or use the Facebook news stream or go in for live messaging the fact remains that real time marketing and even real time ecommerce are beginning to create an impact. From a web development point of view this is the next natural step. The web enamored us light years ago with flashing backgrounds and twinkling stars and has enamored us, every fast-paced year of growth since, with its ability to provide more and more interaction and connectivity. We are no longer content to spend money online, make a purchase and have to wait for a week before the goods arrive, nor do we want to send an email and have to wait three days to get a reply. Unless you have worked the real time web into your marketing you will only be repeating what everyone else is doing right now.

6) Twitter is more than just a microblogging site: The instant messaging and retweeting capability offered by Twitter make it perfect as a research and prediction tool. Used properly it can allow you to find out what your competitors are doing and which topics are trending, both vital for the development of a coherent online strategy designed to allow you to actually get somewhere with your website.

7) More online queries will result in less traffic for websites: This sounds a little oxymoronic but it’s not. Time continues to be at a premium and online we are driven to do things faster and faster. This is one of the reasons Google and Yahoo/BING try to answer queries straight from the search engine query box, making their sites faster and stickier. The result is that when you create content which answers specific questions succinctly the chances are that that content will answer a query straight out of the search engine query box rather than get visitors to your site. This then puts the pressure on you to create content which is more complicated, delivers real value as opposed to a two-sentence fluff you can get anywhere on the web and which truly engages the online visitor.

8) Focus on conversion targets as well as numbers: SEO has always been about building traffic to a website. The new breed of search engine optimizers however aims on building traffic which is far more targeted than before and the conversion rate as well as ROI ought to be higher. This is a trend which will only become more and more important as virtual fences begin to go up and the pool of potential customers you fish in will only get better.

Provided you factor in all this in your online marketing strategy there is no real reason 2011 does not turn out to be a great year for you and your online business.

Source:  SEO Help

Dec 17, 2010

Link Building


Link Building is an active program that increases the number of inbound links into a web site or cross-linking within a web site in order to increase that site's ranking in the search engine rankings for targeted  keywords.
As we All know there are different tactics to get backlinks.

  • One Way Link building
  • Two way link building
  • Three way link building

Observations Need to check while doing link Building:
  • Site Age.
  • Page Rank
  • Theme
  • No. of outbound Links
  • Don’t link on Duplicate content Pages
  • No follow/dofollow, check robots weather restricted page, Meta tag  no index- nofollow
  • Don’t link to Adult sites, Casino, Poker & FFA Sites.
  • Don’t reciprocal to the sites that have iframes.
  • Don’t buy & Sell Links.

As we all know that one way link building is more effective as compared to two way & 3 way link building.
Below given are some useful search queries you can use while searching for one way link building. 

  • inurl:addsite.html +education
  • intitle:education inurl:/resources.html
  • intitle:education inurl:add_link.*
  • intext:"school" inurl:add-link.html
  • +education inurl:add-link.html
  • ~education inurl:add-link.html
  • automotive inurl:add-link.html
  • insurance inurl:add-link.html
  • +keyword inurl:add_url.php
  • +keyword inurl:add_link.html(htm)
  • +keyword inurl:submit.asp
  • +keyword inurl:submit.php
  • +keyword inurl:exchange_links.html
  • +keyword inurl:suggestasite.asp
  • inurl:"[addlink.asp]"
  •  * [ITL] interview
  • * intitle:"[ITL]"
  • * [ITL] forum

Use this query in Google you can see some good results:

·         +automotive  " Before submitting your website to the link directory, please make sure you have created a reciprocal link to this site."

·         allintext:Your site content is appropriate. We reserve the right to refuse a listing to any site. We do not link to primary competitors, adult sites, gambling sites, sites with illegal or inappropriate content, "junk" link sites, or any other site that does not enhance our resource directory.

·         +automotive “An email will be sent to you after you submit this link request. You must click the activation link within the mailer in order to verify your email address. Your link request will be discarded if you do not verify your email address.”

Note :if you see the same site repeated often in the search results as shown in the below screenshot
use this search operator

+education allinurl:add-link.html  -site:totalblogdirectory.com -site:totalindiadirectory.com