Smart SEO

Video Search Engine Optimization Process and Update in VSEO

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 06:30:00 +0000

Video Search Engine Optimization is the part of Search Engine Optimization. now a days there are lots of videos viewed by the people on Internet and and there are more than 26 million hrs videos are available on Internet. Direct to India is the one of the Indian company providing the VSEO Service to promote the video.

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Limite use of Flash in Your site

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:43:00 +0000

Now a Day the Hot topics which are discussed in all webmaster groups is “Google can read flash content is it true or not?” I am also discussing the same topics with my webmaster friends. I am also eager to know how much truth in this news. I found an article in Google blog regarding the flash use in site and how much it is compatible to get SERPs.

Googlebot doesn't have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn't currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

So what's an honest web designer to do? The only hard and fast rule is to show Googlebot the exact same thing as your users. If you don't, your site risks appearing suspicious to our search algorithms. This simple rule covers a lot of cases including cloaking, JavaScript redirects, hidden text, and doorway pages. And our engineers have gathered a few more practical suggestions:

Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google's YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML -- it's just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page "splash screen" where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.

"In their own words": political videos meet Google speech-to-text technology

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:37:00 +0000

In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platforms?

Google teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections.

For more detail please visit Google official Blog.

Google News: Introduction to Google Ranking

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:17:00 +0000

Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google’s search services. While our web search is the most used Google search

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Smart SEO: Outsourcing to India

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:11:00 +0000

Smart SEO: Outsourcing to India

Rapid Web Services

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:08:00 +0000

Create your website with our asp.net content management system with collection of designed template and e-commerce module.

read more | digg story

Outsourcing to India

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:54:00 +0000

Why Outsourcing to India, Reason to Outsource in India is Outsourcing to India can give your organization a competitive edge.

read more | digg story

Google Updating its Algo for Crawling and Indexing Flash Content

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:08:00 +0000

Google had developed a new algorithm for the textual contents of indexing in the Flash files of all the kinds, of the Flash menus, buttons and banners, with the Flash Web sites of only one block. Recently, Google improved the execution of this Flash algorithm of indexing by integrating the Adobe's Flash Player technology.
In the past, the originators of Web raised of the challenges if they chose to develop a site in the flash because the contents which they included were not Indexable by search engines. They had to make the extra effort, make sure that their contents were also presented in another manner which seek engines could find.Now that Google launched their Flash algorithm of indexing, the originators of Web can expect the visibility improved of their published Flash contents, and you can intend to see better results and extracts of research. There’s more information on the Webmaster Central blog about integration Searchable of SWF.

Google can now crawl and index Flash files
Google has been working on improving how they crawl and index rich content (such as Flash and JavaScript) for some time, and in fact have been able to extract some text and links from Flash files for a while. However, their methods weren't perfect, and they tell me that this new technology from Adobe makes Google's algorithms "less error prone" and enables them to access content created in any version of Flash in a variety of languages.

Adobe is providing a Flash player to (some) search engines
Adobe says they have developed an optimized Flash player for search engines and are collaborating with both Google and Yahoo!. Yahoo! has not yet implemented the technology, although they stated that “Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation.” Adobe hasn't made the technology available to Microsoft's Live Search, although they say they are "exploring ways to make the technology more broadly available" to "help make all SWF content more easily searchable". Adobe didn't comment on whether the fact that Microsoft developing competing Silverlight was a factor in their decision not to collaborate with Microsoft Live Search for this initial announcement.

A big step forward
Previously, Google's help documentation has warned against the use of Flash-only sites:
"In general, search engines are text based. This means that in order to be crawled and indexed, your content needs to be in text format. This doesn't mean that you can't include images, Flash files, videos, and other rich media content on your site; it just means that any content you embed in these files should also be available in text format or it won't be accessible to search engines."
They have suggested using Flash sparingly or using a method such as Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) to provide an HTML source that can be rendered as either Flash or non-Flash.
That seems to have changed. The help documentation hasn't been updated, but the post on the Google Webmaster blog says that Googlebot can now extract textual content and links so Google can better crawl, index, and rank the web site.
Both Google and Adobe stressed to me that this is a big win for both site owners and searchers and that it should improve relevancy in search results. They noted that Flash developers don't have to do anything in their applications to make this new technology work for their sites.
This is certainly great news for the web, as it's a sign that search engines, which are the primary method of navigating the web, are evolving beyond text to take into account newer web technologies.
Just how much will this change impact search relevance? It's hard to say until we see the changes, which Google says may take time to percolate through the pipeline. In particular, they note that snippets, the descriptions that display under search results, will be improved. Before, Google often couldn't extract any content from a Flash file, so the description for a Flash page was often either be empty or would consist of the only text available from the file, such as the Flash version or the word "loading."
But although Adobe's press release talks about "dramatic" improvements in search results and more relevant listings for "millions of RIAs" (rich internet applications), neither Adobe nor Google could give me numbers about how many more pages Google was now about to crawl and index and how much this has impacted search results.

Flash Developers Should Still Spend Time on Search Engine Optimization
However, this isn't the perfect solution that it may seem. Adobe assures developers that "RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can be confident it can now be found by users around the globe." But that's not entirely true, particularly for Flash pages that have little textual content.

Only text and links are affected
As Danny Sullivan noted last year when word of Google's work in this area first came up, most Flash content isn't made up of primarily words. It's made up of images, video, and animation, and none of that will be surfaced in search results with this advancement. Google's new Flash algorithms extract text and links only. Everything else is still a black box.

Associate a unique URL with each unique piece of content
In addition, the searcher experience is better served by Flash implementations that provide a unique URL for each set of content. Some Flash implementations dynamically load text as the user interacts with the application, but the URL remains the same. In this scenario, Googlebot can now follow those interactions (in a limited way) and if the URL doesn't change, then all content that is dynamically loaded as the interactions progress is associated with a single URL.
Adobe says the Flash player it is providing to search engines "allows their search spiders to introspect and navigate through a live SWF application as if they were virtual users. The Flash Player technology, optimized for search spiders, enables the ability to traverse and parse all of the different paths in a SWF-based RIA, similar to traversing multiple pages in a standard web application."
This means that if the content that is dynamically loaded into the Flash application from the fifth interaction matches a searcher query, that Flash application may be served in the search results. But when the searcher clicks over to that result, the content won't be found on the page. The searcher will have to interact with the application until that content is loaded. Searchers may instead feel frustrated and abandon the page. For the best user experience and higher conversion rates from search, Flash developers should be careful to avoid this situation by creating distinct URLs for each piece of content. This implementation helps the Flash site be more viral as well, as users can email, Digg, and otherwise share the content more easily.
Google acknowledges this scenario may not be an ideal searcher experience, but points out that other non-HTML file formats such as PDFs have the same limitations. When a searcher clicks through the Google search results to a PDF file, the content that matched the query may not be on the first page of that PDF and the searcher has to scroll through the file to find the desired content. Google notes that just as they flag PDF files to alert searchers that the result is non-HTML, they do the same with Flash file.

What this means for SEOs
Flash has often been a source of frustration for SEOs who argue that text should be in HTML, with Flash used for non-textual content, such as video illustrations. Can SEOs now remove the "review Flash implementation" line from their checklists? Probably not. However, it should be easier for SEOs to work with Flash-based sites going forward.
SEOs should keep in mind that these new algorithms don't take into account any meta data or formatting markup in the Flash file and, for now, Google's cache won't show a representation of the extracted text so site owners can't verify what is actually being crawled by viewing the cached copy. In addition, since Googlebot doesn't execute most JavaScript, Google won't crawl or index any Flash executed via JavaScript. Any external sources that the Flash file loads will be indexed separately, rather than as part of the Flash file. And as noted earlier, all non-textual content will remain uncrawled. This new Flash support covers all languages other than bidrectional ones (Hebrew and Arabic) and all versions of Flash.

What this means for accessibility and usability
Flash developers should continue to think about not only how well their applications can be found in search, but how usable and accessible they are.
Eric Wittman, director of platform distribution and business development at Adobe, told me that Flash web sites can be built for usability and accessibility. He noted that 98% of desktop computers have Flash support, although he acknowledged that he didn't know how many have Flash blockers installed, and he didn't provide numbers on the percentage of mobile devices that don't support Flash.
He noted that screen reader support has been available since Flash Player 6 and that the newer Flex framework includes support for accessibility.
At the recent Developer Day at SMX Advanced, we talked a lot about making Flash applications accessible and search-engine friendly using graceful degradation, and both sFIR and SWFObject came up several times as good methods for ensuring this. I find that still to be good advice even in light of this announcement.
Overall, this announcement is great news for both content owners and searchers. Web developers are becoming more focused on architecting their sites to ensure they can be found in search engines, as search has become one of the primary acquisition channels online. As web technologies evolve, it's important for search engines to evolve as well to ensure they provide the most relevant results for searchers. I'm eager to see how substantial a change this proves to be, although web developers should continue keeping search-friendly practices in mind when developing sites.

Chirag Vyas
http://www.directtoindia.com
Source From
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-crawl-flash.html
http://searchengineland.com/080701-000002.php

Free online seminar: The Google Trifecta

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 07:26:00 +0000

Staying competitive in the online space can be hard if you don't have the proper tools at your disposal. That's why we offer solutions like Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer to help you improve your site's effectiveness and functionality.

You may already use Google Webmaster Tools to help improve your site's visibility in Google's search results, but what can you do to optimize your pages for visitors who have already made it past the search results and into your site? Using Webmaster Tools in conjunction with Analytics and Website Optimizer, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your pages' visibility in Google, where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site, and what content will most effectively get them to take the action you want.

For the first time ever, the Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and Website Optimizer teams will join forces to hold a free online seminar. I'll be there to talk about Webmaster Tools and discuss tips for using it with our other products for site owners. So if you enjoy live webmaster-focused events like our recent JuneTune live chat, check out the details below and register!

TITLE: The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer
DATE: Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
TIME: 9:00 - 10:00 a.m. PT (16:00 UTC)
JOIN US: Register to attend

During this online seminar, team members will:

Provide brief introductions to their products
Highlight recent product updates and releases
Discuss the benefits of using all three products together
Answer common questions submitted by attendees

Upon registration, we also invite you to submit any specific topics you'd like us to cover. If you can't make that date or time, don't worry. We know that 9 a.m. for us isn't 9 a.m. for everyone! You'll be able to access an archived version of the presentation via the same registration URL.
Chirag Vyas
http://www.directtoindia.com
Source From

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/free-online-seminar-google-trifecta.html

Smart SEO

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 06:39:00 +0000

How Google creates the description of your website for the result page

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 04:38:00 +0000

Having high rankings on search engines is a great thing. However, it's also important that your web pages are displayed with an attractive description in the search results. If the description is not appealing to web surfers then they might not click the link.

How do Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live create the descriptions and snippets that are used in the search results?

How Google creates descriptions and snippets

Google seems to use the description from the meta description tag if you search for a page by its URL, or if the searched keywords do not appear within the found page.

If the found web page doesn't have a meta description tag then Google seems to use the sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description.

If a web page is listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ.org) then Google might also use the description that is used in the DMOZ directory.

How Yahoo creates descriptions and snippets

Yahoo seems to use only the first part of the meta description which is complemented by a text snippet from the searched page that contains the searched keyword.

If a web page doesn't have a meta description, Yahoo will use the description of the web page from Yahoo's directory (if the page is listed there).

If a web page has no meta description and is not listed in the Yahoo directory, then Yahoo will display sentences from the found web page that contain the searched keywords.

How MSN/Live creates descriptions and snippets

MSN/Live seems to use the first sentence that contains the searched keyword as the description. If the searched keyword does not appear on the page, MSN/Live seems to use the first sentence that appears on the page.

If available, MSN/Live will also use the DMOZ directory description in the results.

What does this mean for your web pages?

If you want to make sure that your web pages are listed with an appealing description in the search results, you should use meta descriptions on your web pages. If you don't want to use the description that is used in the Yahoo directory and on DMOZ.org you should use the corresponding tags that prevent search engines from using these descriptions.

Social Media Isn't......

noreply@blogger.com (Chirag Vyas) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:25:00 +0000

There are so many things that Social Media is, and covering those would take a rather long time and make for rather long post. However, I felt compelled enough after researching with social media strategies, to address what 10 things Social Media Isn't.

Social Media Isn't: Easy

So many public relations professionals, advertising agencies and even search marketing firms see Social Media as this "bright, shiny, new medium" that's easy to just throw things out there and think it will automatically just work. If it were only that easy! Social Media takes a lot of hard work and it also takes time (the next bullet item).

Social Media Isn't: Fast

"I put it out on Digg, it should hit the front page in an hour!" If you have worked in Social Media, and heard anyone say that, more than likely you've snickered at hearing a statement like that. Only in the very rarest of situations does social media take off like a rocket. Most plans take time, effort and planning to make them successful.

Social Media Isn't: A Substitute for Sound SEO Practices

Not ranking in the Search Engine Results? Think Social Media will shoot you up to the top in no time flat? Think again! There can be some cases where it might happen (the keyword "purple and blue polka dotted widgets" comes to mind here), but for any competitive keywords, Social Media alone just won't cut it if you want to rank for keywords. Websites still need sound SEO fundamentals if they are going to compete in competitive markets.

Social Media Isn't: A Substitute for Sound PPC Practices

Just like still needing sound SEO fundamentals, if you have a PPC campaign, don't abandon it just because you're dabbling in Social Media. Social Media can be fleeting. You can hit big one day and it may last 2-3 more, but then you can sink like a rock for weeks to come. Abandoning your PPC would only hurt your online marketing efforts.

Social Media Isn't: A Practice to be Done by Interns

If you are a big company looking at interns to "play around in Facebook", please stop. Actually, maybe you should, then, you can call a professional (like me, or many of my fine colleagues) to fix up the mess your intern created. Seriously, Social Media is serious business, stop and think, do you REALLY want to leave your brand's identity in the hands of a college or high school intern?

Social Media Isn't: Another Place to Distribute Your Press Release

If your public relations company is saying "Oh we'll send this out to the social media outlets, too", run, run far far away. Ever hear of the "Bad Pitch Blog"? If your PR Firm or Advertising Agency is offering this, you'll end up there in no time flat! Then you'll be paying the PR Firm (or it might be better to hire a social media or search marketing professional) to dig you out of the mess the PR Firm created in the first place.

Social Media Isn't: Something That Will Work if Your Site is "Broken"

How is your conversion rate now? Are people reading what you want them too? Are you getting the subscribers you want to your email list? If your site isn't working - forms are broken, links are broken, shopping carts are difficult to use, etc., Social Media won't fix that. In fact it might make things even worse, or make you believe your Social Media plan isn't working.

Social Media Isn't: Something To Send Out Mass Emails For

This really, absolutely, makes experienced bloggers irate. Your email gets dumped in the trash. If you send out a mass email with the same exact wording to bloggers, word will get around and you will likely end up on that Bad Pitch Blog.

Social Media Isn't: Something You Can Do Without Participation

Many marketers are under the assumption they can just submit things to social media sites and they will have success. This is where their thinking/judgment errs. Social Media is about .... *drum rolls* .... being social. Without a conversation, without being part of the community, the community will backlash and "out" you for what you really are, a marketer.

Social Media Isn't: Something You Can Do in Disguise

You might want to ask Edleman, Walmart, Sony and Microsoft about this one. Social media communities can smell a fake right away, and when they out you, it isn't pretty. Even a year later, we're still pointing to these major snafus as what "not" to do, that should be enough to show you, be transparent from the get go.

Returns Of Social Media Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 05:09:00 +0000

There are essentially four different types of return that you can expect from a successful social media marketing campaign: links, mindshare/branding, sales and consumer interaction.

Below, a look at each type of return and how you can tap into it, depending on your goals.

Links

Using social media for link building is most popular within the SEO community, and for good reason. Using social news sites as a platform to spread your content (linkbait) can effectively produce hundreds or thousands of new inbound links to your site. Compare that with paying or begging for links, and you can quickly see why linkbaiting is going mainstream, at least within our community.

The objective here is to produce a piece of remarkable content that will spread virally and naturally collect links. The big social news sites already have millions of users, so the idea is to leverage these sites to get your story popular enough so that it's exposed to their user base. A popular piece of content on these sites is seen by tens of thousands of hungry bloggers looking for stories to blog about.

Sites that are best for building link are Digg, Delicious, Netscape, and Reddit (see Forget ABCs - The Social Media Alphabet Is DNRS and More Letters Of The Social Media Alphabet to learn more about these sites and others mentioned below).

Mindshare & Branding

Social media marketing goes beyond just traffic and links. It is also great for creating mindshare, branding initiatives, and brand awareness. It doesn’t matter if you have a new brand or one that is well established, using social media can help build or strengthen it.

Social media is also part of a brand experience when users interact in these channels. If the experience is positive, high-energy, interesting or funny, all of these elements will support a unique brand experience and support ongoing initiatives in this area. Positive or negative experiences here can really have an impact on a brand.

A few examples of positive experiences include funny videos, useful content, flash games, and contests based on user participation. Each of these methods help engage a deeper dialogue or interaction with the consumer and can help get closer to the customer.

Best sites for creating mindshare are YouTube and MySpace.

Sales

The bottom line for many marketing campaigns is to bring an increase in sales. Sometimes this is done directly and sometimes it is a very indirect process. It is very hard to create a social media marketing campaign that will result in direct sales. This is because you're reaching consumers in a non-purchasing stage of the cycle. It contrasts from standard SEO where consumers are looking for what you're selling and at the point of purchase already. Social media is less intrusive, and part of the reason people engage is because there's more there than just a selling message. Any content piece with a strong selling message will not be received well or successful.

The best way to generate sales through social media is to show how good your product is in a creative way and compelling way. Blendtec, for example, has created a campaign called Will it Blend?, where they take various consumer items that you would think are impossible to blend and they blend them. This shows off their product is in a way that is compelling for the consumer to watch. Since the launch of the campaign in November, sales for the company have quadrupled.

Sites that are best for direct sales are MySpace, YouTube, or any highly targeted social site.

Customer Interaction

There are a lot of benefits to interacting with your customers through social media. Some of these include improving products or services, establishing trust, being viewed as the authority in your space and creating evangelists.

The most common form of customer interaction in social media is done through blogging. With a blog, your goal should be to establish an open dialogue with your customers. This means that should allow comments on the blog, and you should also be participating on other relevant blogs.

Blogging is not the only way to interact with your customers in social media. Consider reaching out to them in the communities where they hang out but be sure tread lightly as they can very easily have the opposite effect you are hoping for. Remember, social media is somewhere that consumers feel safe from marketers, so you need to have the right approach.

Another strategy is to build white label social media sites for your customers with topics focused around your brand or industry. Examples of these include: Guitar Center's King of the Blues, Dell’s IdeaStorm and My Barack Obama.

These are all breakdowns for some of the ways social media marketing can be effective today. The environment is still evolving and growing. As we see more participation in different ways, the landscape will pose even more opportunity for marketing. I may not have covered everything here. Are there any other positive outcomes that have resulted from a social media marketing campaign that you can think of? Please comment below!

The Layout Of Email Marketing Space

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 04:24:00 +0000

Emails are sent to potential customers to boost the business, and gain the trust of the customer by disclosing relevant information and help them to make good shopping decisions. It also enhances the relationship with a current customer, by doing repeat business with them. In simple words, the procedure of sending emails to customers is known as email marketing.

The major advantage of email marketing is that it doesn’t consume a lot of time. It is minimal in resource consuming and is also cost-efficient. Within a short period, a large audience can be targeted.
Features such as Subscriptions, bounced messages, web bugs, and click throughs help enables businesses to track potential customers. Since the customers can be directly reached, feedbacks can be collected with ease. In terms of cost, it is not as expensive as newsletters. Reports have proven that this is the next best marketing technique after search marketing. It is effective in tracking the returns on investments.

Email marketing is a modernized version of mail marketing. The advantage over direct mail marketing is that it takes less time to reach a customer than mailing. Like people check their mailboxes daily, inbox is also checked by majority of the Internet users on a daily basis. Over a period of time, lots of helpful tools and web services have been developed. List host is web service that provides lots of options to the marketers like managing huge emails and email address databases. If the budget is more, list managers can be hired who can be given charge of opt-in-email newsletters and managing databases. Software is also available in the market that does this job too.

When the customer fills the form for the first time, there are check boxes to be ticked which reflects their interests. Depending on these choices, an advertiser sends information to them, this is known as opt-in-email advertising, because the customer has opted to receive emails and marketing like this isn’t illegal. The content of the email can be elaborate, but it shouldn’t be too long, as people are too busy for that. The call to action, also known as effective words, in the email should be chosen with care. It’s not necessary that the content should revolve around only one item; related product’s information can also be included. This is known as cross selling. By using email blasting or sending an email to multiple customers at a time can save a lots of time and will also increase the efficiency.

The dark side of email marketing is spamming or also known as bulking. Some companies collect email addresses of people illegally and send irrelevant mails to them, which can be very annoying.
Some hackers design an email like an advertisement, but when clicked on downloads adware and viruses that can destroy a computer, which makes it even more dangerous. To make matters worse, the Direct Marketing Association of America has petitioned to make spamming legal. Some prohibitions are also placed on providers who help out business organizations to manage their email marketing by giving them already prepared email templates.

Most of the mailing websites have added the facility of separating spam from genuine email by creating separate folders for both and this is known as spam filtering. But in case of large number of spam mails, a useful mail can go into that folder and can go unnoticed and gets deleted with the rest of the spam mails. This kind of mail is known as false positives. But the chances of this happening are rare. There are many laws against spamming like United States’ Can-Spam act, Europe’s privacy and electronic communications regulations. According to these laws, the companies should get their return address authenticated, false physical addresses should not be included and a one click unsubscribe link should be place in the email. The lesser penalty involves companies sending spam to be blacklisted and on a larger scale, they can be heavily fined.

3 Top Search Engines’ Webmaster Tools: Which Gives the Better Site Data?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 04:26:00 +0000

Webmaster tools are used by site owners and developers to determine how search engines see their sites in terms of inbound and outbound links and search query used that lands users to their sites. With the recent launch of MSN Live Search Webmaster Center, the 3 major search engines are now in equal footing in terms of providing this nifty tool for webmasters and site owners.

But unfortunately, the webmaster tools of these 3 major search engines are not the same in terms of providing useful site information. In terms of giving inbound and outbound links analysis and search query/keywords analysis, the 3 search engines differ in so many ways.

Here’s a head-to-head comparison of how the webmaster tools of these 3 major search engines present relevant site data and how useful this presentation in answering webmaster and site owners’ needs.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Yahoo’s Site Explorer presents inlinks by listing the different sites that links to a user’s site through deep inlinks within the different parts of the referring site. The site explorer does not give data on which keywords are performing well for the site. That is which keywords brought more traffice.

MSN Live Search Webmaster Center

MSN Live Search present this data in terms of outbound links (Top links from) and inbound links (Top links to). However it does not give the number of inbound links but just rank these based on its popularity and perhaps the number of times the inbound links from other sites were clicked. The same is true for the outbound links. In addition to the ranking, Live Search Webmaster Center also gives the geographic location of the domain which provided the inbound or outbound links and the language used by the site.

For the keyword analysis part, to view which keywords in the different site pages are performing well for a particular site, users must enter the keywords before MSN gives a listing of of the pages and a ranking of how well this keyowrds performed for the site.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google’s webmaster tools beat the other two search engines’ tools in terms site link and keyword analysis. Inbound links are presented in tabular list and gives the number of inbound links from external sites. Clicking on the number of external links will direct the user to the list of sites with links that points to a user’s site. In addition, Google Webmaster Tools also gives the number of links from the site to another pages in the same site.

For keyword analysis, Google Webmaster Tools have the Top Search Queries that presents which keywords perform well in terms of returning pages from a user’s site. Top Search Queries data spans up to six months coverage. This is very useful for search engine optimizers in better optimizing their site for a specific keyword.

Clearly, Google Webmaster Tools beat the tools of the other two search engines big time. Since MSN Live Search is still in its infancy stage, it definitely pales in comparison with Google’s Webmaster Tools. If Yahoo’s Site Explorer does not make a revamp/restructure/redesigned immediately, it may find itself at the back of MSN in this search engines’ race. But yes, Google’s webmaster tools provide the best data and is the most useful for webmasters and site owners.

Google warns against cloaking: we can detect it

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 04:21:00 +0000

In a recent blog post, Google's anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts wrote about cloaking. The blog post makes several things clear:

Google doesn't like cloaking.
It doesn't matter if a small or a big company uses cloaking.
Websites that use cloaking will be removed from Google's index.
Google will detect all cloaking attempts sooner or later.

What is cloaking?

Cloaking is a search engine optimization technique in which the web page content presented to search engine spiders is different from that presented to the normal web surfers.

This is done by delivering web page content based on the IP address or the User-Agent of the user requesting the page.

When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a script on the server delivers a different version of the web page. The purpose of cloaking is to deceive search engines.

All major search engines consider cloaking to be a violation of their guidelines. For that reason, websites that use cloaking will be banned from the search results.

Google's opinion on "undetectable" cloaking

In his recent blog post, Google's Matt Cutts commented on a Danish company that offered 'undetectable' cloaking to its customers.

Google tried to check if this claim was true and they quickly found a website that used the services of the company. It turned out that their cloaking wasn't undetectable at all:

"If someone is trying to manipulate Google by deceptive cloaking, it means that a webserver is returning different content to Googlebot than to users.

Thatâ€™s a condition that can be checked for by algorithms or manually, and such cloaking is certainly not 'undetectable.'"

Don't risk your search engine rankings

You might get short term results with shady SEO techniques such as cloaking but it is very likely that your site will be banned from search engines if you use them. You'll put your web business at severe risk if you use black-hat SEO methods.

Search Engine Site Maps

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 04:12:00 +0000

Looking for a way to direct the search crawlers to each and every page on your website? Google, Yahoo, and MSN have all agreed to support one method of submitting a site's pages: through an XML map placed on the root of a website.

This week's infographic shows how search engine sitemaps provide a quick and easy road map for crawlers to follow in order to locate and index each of the pages on your site.

How long does it take until a new site ranks in Search Engine

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 10:29:00 +0000

In a recent test, a webmaster optimized his site for a four word keyword. After about three weeks, Yahoo and MSN showed the website in the top 10 results.

Even after several weeks, the same website was nowhere to be seen in Google's top 10 results. The highest result that the website could obtain on Google was position 30:

What does this mean for you?

It looks like Yahoo and MSN are much faster to list new websites in their result pages. The test confirmed that Google has filters for new websites.

For webmasters, the results of this test mean that they have to overcome Google's filters for new sites if they want to have top 10 rankings.

It's difficult for new websites to get high rankings on Google but it is possible. You have to make sure that Google trusts your site.

For searchers, the results of this little test mean that Google might not always have the best search resaults, particularly when it's a search for new content. Yahoo and MSN might be the better choice for some searches.

Is your website still not listed in Google's top 10 for your keyword?

Is your website still not listed in Google's top 10 results although your site is several months old?

Your keywords might be the reason for the problem. If you target very competitive keywords, then it will take much longer until your website is listed in the top 10 rankings.

If you want to get high rankings for competitive keywords, then you need very many good inbound links that contain your keyword in the anchor text.

If you target keywords that consist of one or two words then you might want to reconsider them. One word keywords usually don't lead to sales because these keywords are too general.

Keywords that consist of four words are much more likely to convert to sales than shorter keywords (source: Oneupweb Research).