Within this semi-polluted world, we are always looking for new ways to help the environment and reduce our carbon footprint. There is now a search engine that we can utilize called Simp-Search.com, an innovative and environmentally friendly search portal.

The way that Simp-Search.com helps conserve energy is by displaying a black background on screen for the search page and also its SERPs as well. This idea came out of a 2007 article titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year that discussed Google and its popularity, and how its popularity would save more energy for their users if Google presented its SERPs with a black background. With this in mind, Planet Hosted (Simp-Search.com‘s parent company) took on the initiative to make all of the pages on their search engine present to the user with a black background.

Simp-Search.com presents the following statement about their quality search engine:

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Simp-Search.com every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy. We are a very young organization with a promising future in “Going Green.”

If you would like to browse Simp-Search.com rather than search, this quality search engine includes various categories (such as: Internet, Finance, and Insurance) that you can browse through as well.

Simp-Search.com also recommends that you set their website to your browser’s default home page. This way, you can automatically save energy just by opening up a new browser window.

If you are a constant reader of mySEOblog, you will know that is very common for the search giant Google to update their SERPs, and sometimes not in a very pleasing way for its audience. The search engine giant is up to modifying the SERPs again by implementing a new “Sources” section when reviewing specific search results.

The new “Sources” section will appear in the far-right (third) column of the SERPs, displaying various information on entertainment industry statistics, biographies, and more information about the people and happenings in the media.

Danny Sullivan, the editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land noticed the “Sources” section while recently performing a search in Google. While reviewing the results in the SERPs, Sullivan did come across the following disclaimer that confirmed that the “Sources” idea is an experiment:

“We’re always experimenting with ways to improve search, but we have nothing to announce at this time.”

Since the “Sources” section of the SERPs is still in experimental mode, this feature can not be seen by everyone just yet; however, I have provided a preview of what the “Sources” section of the SERPs will look like below from Danny Sullivan’s SEL post.

What do you think about the possible “Sources” section of the SERPs? Is this information valuable to Google users, or will it just clutter the SERPs even more? Please let us know your reaction below in this post’s comments section.

In the SEO world, backlinks are a great thing. Increasing the amount of backlinks pointing toward your site will help improve your site’s visibility in common search engines, such as: Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Even though increasing your backlink count is a good practice to have, sometimes where the backlinks come from can be an issue, especially if the backlinks are inorganic. The recent Google algorithm update called Google Penguin really emphasizes backlink origin and how you should check the backlink origins of your website to get better optimization within the common search engines.

To check if your site is overly optimized, I would like to bring your attention to a quality tool called the Over Optimisation Penalty Checker. This resourceful tool will e-mail you a report of the amount of bad/inorganic links that are pointing to your website. All that you have to do is to specify the URL of your website, along with the e-mail address where you would like the report e-mailed to you, and this quality tool will automatically review your website for you.

In the report that the Over Optimisation Penalty Checker will present to you, a comprehensive list of the inorganic backlinks will displayed. This will help you determine how to organize your current backlink situation, along with displaying the anchor text that the backlinks to your website come from.

Have you used the Over Optimisation Penalty Checker tool? If so, please be sure to leave your feedback of this quality tool below in this post’s comments section.

When creating a website (especially from scratch), it is always best to insert meta information into the header of your website’s HTML code. This way, when search engines crawl your website, the search engines’ crawlers will look at the meta information of your website first to include keywords and phrases for your snippet. Meta information is also important to have when submitting your website to various link directories, so that information can easily be obtained for your directory listing.

If you are unsure of what meta information is, this is the description and keywords that you insert between the meta tags included within your website’s header information. For more information about how to insert meta code into your website, please review this information from the W3C.

If you would like to view your website’s header information without having to dig through its HTML code, I would like to bring your attention to a quality website called MetaHeaders. This service will display the following information pertaining to your website.

• A summary of your website’s hosting information, such as: its IP, datacenter location, and web server software.
• Meta tags have: robots, content type, keywords, refresh, cache control, pragma, and many more.
• Headers have: date, last modified, content length, content type, and many more.

This tool is also great to use to view your competitor’s meta information. This way, you can see what kind of information your competitor is using to draw in their customers.

Google, the world’s largest and well-known search engine, is soon to be undergoing some changes that will affect the way results will be organized in the SERPs. This may wreak havoc among the SEO community, because many of the webmasters have already been adjusting their websites to the recent algorythms that Google has released. Now, another change will be taking place that will alter Google’s algorhythm even more.

Last week, according to a Wall Street Journal article, the well-known search engine will be giving its SERPs an overhaul, presenting more facts and direct answers relating to the search query that the user performs. This system will make the keyword-based algorythm, at the moment, redundant and less useful. The direction that Google is heading towards is called “Semantic Search.” I have provided an elaborate description below from Wikipedia that best outlines this new search direction:

“Rather than using ranking algorithms such as Google’s PageRank to predict relevancy, Semantic Search uses semantics, or the science of meaning in language, to produce highly relevant search results. In most cases, the goal is to deliver the information queried by a user rather than have a user sort through a list of loosely related keyword results.”

To describe an example of how the new “Semantic Search” technology will work, an example from WSJ article is if a user searches for “Lake Tahoe,” Google’s SERPs will display specific attributes about the lake (location, altitude, etc.). Current searches for “Lake Tahoe” will present you with its visitor bureau website its page on Wikipedia, and maps.

What do you think about the new direction that Google’s search is heading? Will this improve SEO or make it worse? Let us know your reaction below in this post’s comments section.

In the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world, PageRank means everything! If Google and other search engines did not have a page-ranking system, the concept of SEO would not be as important as it is in today’s Internet world. If you or your business are heavily involved within the web design and administration worlds, monitoring your PageRank and position within the SERPs of various search engines is an important task. With this in mind, I would like to bring your attention to GoRank, which will help you achieve this.

GoRank is a quality SEO tool that allows you to enter the URL of your website and monitor how your site’s Page Rank changes through time. Below, I have provided some of the key features and benefits to using this quality site.

• Track all of your keyword rankings
• Google API Key Compatible
• This service is offered to you at no charge
• View daily, weekly, and monthly trends
• Graphs visually show your rankings
• Unlimited domains and keywords

With search engine algorythms constantly changing, along with the amount of backlinks increasing to your website, keeping track of your PageRank is crucial for the survival of your website, and checking your PageRank will also give you an edge above your company’s competitors. Be sure to use GoRank to help you keep your data up to date.

Do you use GoRank to keep track of your PageRank? If so, please be sure to leave your feedback on this quality tool below in our comments section.

LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals can also be used as a professional search engine. Many companies use this business-related social network to find prospective employees in a specific field or niche that would fit a staff position. If you have a LinkedIn account, many of you will see that various businesses around the web have probably been searching for you, designated by the “Who Viewed Your Profile?” section on the right-hand side of your LinkedIn news feed.

With LinkedIn being a powerful search tool, the social network has announced the launch of new features to its “Group Search.” This past week, Brad Mauney of the popular business social network exclaimed the following statement about “Group Search.”

“Every day, millions of professionals like you are talking on LinkedIn’s Groups to find opportunities, share knowledge, and learn from each other. This is why today we’re announcing some important improvements to group search. Group search helps you search across all the groups on LinkedIn and find the right group for you. We’ve made several improvements to make your search results smarter and more relevant.”

I have specified the new changes pertaining to LinkedIn‘s Group Search below.

• Best Results – Instead of depending on the title and/or description of the group you are looking for, the results that will be displayed are from the conversations from within the group itself, giving you more up-to-date information from the group and, in turn, providing you more relevant results.
• Filtering – You can now filter the results of your search by network, categories, and language.

Be sure to try out these new advancements by LinkedIn, and let us know what you think by posting your feedback below in this post’s comments section.

One of the great features of the search giant Google’s maps service is that users can view actual photos of the street and its surrounding locations via an alternative service called Google StreetView. This is a great service that allows potential visitors to the area to see what is around, and it also gives a visual representation of the location as well. To capture these images, Google Cars with a mounted camera travel all around the world taking images of the surrounding streets at high resolution.

With the amount of traffic that this service acquires, the search giant thought it would be a great idea to parody Google StreetView by altering the way this captures the high-resolution images. On April first, Google announced their Street Roo service.

The purpose of Google’s Street Roo project is to equip over 1,000 kangaroos with a 360-degree head camera (just like the Google Cars) to capture quality high-resolutions photographs of the arid Australian outback (where Google Cars can’t go). These cameras will be activated during the daytime hours while the kangaroos are on the move. Software has also been created to remove motion from the kangaroo so that viewing these images from the kangaroo is as seamless as possible.

Google also has been in cooperation with marsupial specialists to ensure that the kangaroo’s daily habits are not interfered:

“Leading marsupial specialists undertook extensive research to ensure that the image capture activity would not interfere with the roo’s grazing, sleeping or breeding activities. The cropped jackets that the kangaroos will wear have been designed to keep the pouch area completely accessible for the joey at all times.”

On April 2nd, it was announced that this information pertaining to Google Street Roo project was an April Fool’s Day prank.

In today’s Internet world, statistics are everything, and there are many tools out there on the web to help present and deliver the information that you need pertaining to your website’s performance. Statistics are a great way of evaluating how well your website is performing within search engines, along with discovering any hindrances that are blocking your business’ success. For this edition of mySEOblog, I would like to bring your attention to a quality website statistics tool called SurCentro that is great for evaluating your website’s performance.

After you have entered your website’s URL into SurCentro, this quality statistics website displays the following information that will help you see your search engine performance:

• Stats and Traffic Info – Alexa Rank, Compete Rank, Google Page Rank (along with Google links and indexed pages), Bing and Yahoo Links, and information from Wayback Machine.
• SEMRush Info – Google SE Traffic & Price, Google AdWords Traffic & Price, along with displaying organic keywords.
• Server Info – Displays the place where your website is hosted, along with its IP and host provider.
• Detailed Description – This information is dynamic for every website that is entered. This will tell you how the page was made, along with any other websites that are hosted on the same server.

Do you use SurCentro to display your website’s search engine statistics? If so, please be sure to leave your feedback on this quality website below in this post’s comments section.

When booking a flight online, are you always visiting various independent travel websites for prices to your destination when you would like them all in one place? That vision is now a reality with Google Flight Search. This service allows users to find cheap flights from various travel services around the web and displays their price, route, and duration in a convenient place within their SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

This new service was announced by the search engine giant a few days ago. Since then, Google has received a lot of feedback about the service as described in the statement below.

“Since we launched Flight Search, we’ve heard from many globetrotters eager to use the feature to search for destinations outside the U.S. Starting today, you can find flights, including international destinations, from the U.S. quickly and conveniently.”

To see Google Flight Search in action within Google’s SERPs, all that you have to do is to enter “flights to” along with the exact destination. For example, if I wanted to search for flights to Denver, Colorado, my search query would be “Flights to Denver, CO.” If I wanted to see my flight destination from a different location, I can include the departure location within my search query as “Flights to Denver, CO from Chicago, IL.”

To see a visual representation of a flight’s route, be sure to visit the actual Google Flight Search website. A map (provided by Google Maps) will be displayed showing the exact plan of the flight information that you have entered.

This is another great way Google is making searching for the resources you need in an easier and better fashion!