Traffficum.com – Traffic for your website

Posts Tagged ‘post’

Interestingly enough, Yahoo search engineers have been doing a great work to give you an enhanced Yahoo search experience. This is an interesting news coming when the Yahoo-Microsoft deal is just few months from materializing. The most prominent of the search enhancements is the new Yahoo search page design which according to a post on the Yahoo Search Blog “will make search more personally relevant and helps people explore things that matter most to them.” Here are some new things that have been rolled out on Yahoo Search:

• A unique search page design realigning with the new Yahoo Home Page.
• Easy access to various Yahoo search features including Search Pad, Search Scan and Safe Search have been made more easy.
• Addition of “Related searches” in the search assist layer.
• Enhanced search results from more sites such as Wikipedia

The enhancements made by Yahoo are being tested out to a selected percentage of U.S users, but might take some more time for you to see it live.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Yahoo- Rolling Out Search Product Enhancements

Of late, people have been noticing changes in Google web search. So, is this Google web search update for August, 2009? Maybe! Over the last weekend people have noticed a few changes which they assume as a possible Google web search update. There are threads posted on this topic at DigitalPoint Forums and at WebmasterWorld.

In the WebmasterWorld thread, senior member BillyS (post number 3977195) said:

“We started to see some pretty big changes this morning.This appears to be a return to our pre-summer positions.”

However, Google's Matt Cutts commented below the post at Search Engine Roundtable that he was not aware of any update.

“I'm on vacation this week, but other than the Caffeine update, I'm not aware of any changes that would be noticed on a large scale. I'm happy to pass on example queries though if people want to point them out though.”

Forum discussion is going on at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!

Post from: PageTraffic SEO Blog Now updated thrice a day!

Is Google Updating Web Search For August 2009?

A recent post at the Search Engine Roundtable reported about the Apple App store for the iPhone gaining its first application to manage Google AdWords campaigns. The application which enables AdWords advertisers to manage their campaigns on the go was developed by Webdevs.com. The PPC Editor is not created by Google, however, it uses Google's API in order to pull data from advertisers campaigns. The PPC Editor can be downloaded in the iTunes store for $16.99. Below are a few screenshots from the iTunes store:

Forum discussion is going on at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

A recent post at Google AdSense Blog lets us know that Google is going to make changes to the AdSense's contextual targeting algorithms in order to make ads on a website more relevant to its webpages. 

"This week, we’ll be rolling out a series of enhancements to AdSense's contextual targeting capabilities, which will more accurately match relevant ads to webpages,” said Woojin Kim, Google AdSense Product Manager.

Publishers will not require to update their AdSense accounts or ads, as these will be taken care of automatically. With the new enhancements, Google hopes to provide users with more relevant ads, help advertisers generate much more attractive returns by finding the right users and facilitate publishers to make more money.

I know all of you SEO.com fans out there are wondering “what are the most important plugins that I can use on my WordPress blog for SEO”? Well, I’ve decided to unveil our secret stash of the best WordPress plugins for SEO because this is the year of sharing. And also I’d like to see if anyone else can think of any better ones. These are not listed in order of importance, Platinum SEO Pack is the best for overall search engine optimization though, so start there.

Plugin #1: FeedBurner FeedSmith

This probably won’t directly affect your seo on site, but the better reach your blog posts have, the more chance someone has to read it, and link to it if they were inspired by what you say. So you have to write good content first, and then this plugin becomes 100% more effective at building links.

Plugin #2: Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

A must have for every website, XML sitemaps should be generated on the fly and updated whenever you add a new page or write a new post. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Plugin #3: Friend Connect Commenting Plugin

You can now allow visitors to log in with their FriendConnect ID, and leave a comment with that same ID. This means that your visitors can log in with their Google, Yahoo!, AIM or OpenID account, by just clicking a button

Plugin #4: Google Analytics

The interfaces are fancy, and the fine grained stats and AdSense integration make it a particularly powerful tool when you’re seeking to push a product online using AdSense.

Plugin #5: Platinum SEO Pack

If you are already using All In One SEO Pack, this plugin will automatically import all the settings, that you have defined using All in one SEO plugin. You just need to verify the options, through Setting->Platinum SEO page of your wordpress blog. Platinum SEO Pack is also compatible with earlier versions of wordpress, though I recommend you to upgrade to the latest version of wordpress.

Plugin #6: Search Excerpt

It extracts out the search keywords, scans the content of matched post entries, and displays document snippets around the keyword, with that specific keyword highlighted. It adds a filter in get_the_excerpt() function so no modification needs to be done to WordPress’ 1.5/2.x theme. For other themes, make sure during “the loop” in search.php, it calls the_excerpt() to display the post entries.

Plugin #7: SRG Clean Archives

This plugin is designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion that’s search engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar.

Plugin Features: It lists the Month / Year, shows total post count for the month (enabled by default), the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article (permalink to article) and the number of comments (enabled by default) that have been made on each article.

Plugin #8: WordPress Database Backup

WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

A post in the Inside Adwords revealed that Google has recently rolled out a set of professional looking templates for AdWords' Display Ad Builder. Just to remind you, Display Ad Builder was launched last year and since its introduction Google has helped advertisers streamline their design process.

The new set of professional looking display ad templates (read “Elegant”) belongs to the “General” category template of the Display Ad Builder. These templates have ready-made buttons with unique shapes, icons and color treatments, and backgrounds with subtle gradients. With the templates advertisers just need to upload their product images along with the text and the rest is taken care of by the template selected. With these innovative templates Google aims at providing useful resources for creating high-quality ads easily, consuming a very little time and without being required to use complex graphics software.

Here are a few examples of of the new templates:

In order to use these new templates, advertisers need to open any of their existing campaign in AdWords and click Display Ad Builder on the Create an ad page. To learn more about creating and running display ads, visit the Display Ads 101 tutorial.

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz about real-time search, but is it necessary? First, let’s look at the current state of search and crawl.*

Unless your site is decidedly authoritative, like CNN.com, you’re likely to get crawled as Google indexes more authoritative sites that are linking to your own. Your site will end up on a particular crawling schedule.

The lengthening or shortening of the crawl schedule, with blogs especially, is largely determined by the amount of new content found on the site each time it’s crawled. In the chart below, the diagonal lines represent getting crawled by the search engine and the ominous black spots represent posting new content.  In this case, if you haven’t posted in a while, you’ve probably worked up a fairly large interval between crawls. If you suddenly return to posting on a consistent schedule, over time the crawl interval will be narrowed until your content gets indexed soon after posting.

In essence, you can and should train Google to index your site more frequently by posting new content regularly or by getting new backlinks to your site.

Real-time indexation is just what it sounds like. Content is indexed and searchable immediately upon publication. None of the big three engines are there yet.

Is real-time indexing by search engines (and hence real-time search) inevitable? It’s starting to appear so.

Twitter is already considered to be real-time, though it’s far from a genuine search engine. Microsoft seems to have tweaked Bing to place higher value on more recent news. In tests, Google Caffeine, the new under-infrastructure version of the search giant, seems to be indexing a lot more pages and giving higher placement to the newest content than the current version. And Facebook’s FriendFeed acquisition suggests they’re definitely eyeing the real-time search space.

Real-time search helps anybody who reads or writes content with a short shelf-life. If you post about an in-progress disaster, a celebrity death, or a limited-time offer, your content is hot one minute, cold the next, so quick indexation by search engines means that your content will be found while it’s still relevant. You would probably gain a good amount of site traffic just by riding the wave and capitalizing on long-tail searches, regardless of how frequently you post.

The real-time search goal has plenty of obstacles. Real-time indexation takes a mountain of data computation power. Plus, algorithmically, how do you consistently showcase an on-scene Twitterer’s play-by-play updates over the Huffington Post side commentary during a crisis? Or do you? You can’t use backlinks as a determinant. Authority is negligible. One practical solution would be to house real-time search separate from regular search, just like Google News is separate from the primary index. Regardless, real-time search is only as valuable as the relevance of the top-ranking content and is likely to look different from today’s version.

Until we get there, the most important thing you can do now is get your site as close as possible to real-time indexation using the available SEO techniques.

• Create good content on a consistent schedule, applying other relevant SEO tactics to optimize your site, and building up your authority
• Create sitemaps for your site so search engines know which pages to crawl
• Use NoFollow tags on non-critical pages as a way of shining a light on the more important ones
• Submit your site and content to directories and social bookmarking sites
• Work on building links from more authoritative sites pointing to your own

*For clarification, crawling (or spidering) is the method search engines use to populate their data repositories so people can search using their websites. It involves running programs called bots (or spiders) that go from link to link scouring web pages and returning information to be indexed.

I just finished reading Justin Brigg’s post “9 SEO Tips”. The post may have a boring title but his tips are pretty sound. I especially liked tip number 5, which tells about the power of the hash #, something frequently overlooked, if known at all, by SEO newbies. On my next post I will be expounding on the uses of the hash but for now what I’ll really be writing about was inspired by the accompanying illustration on the need to compromise to come up with a good web design. The illustration, which I’ve shown below, may seem funny but is perfectly true.

As I have written back in 2008 both in my posts entitled “More than Just Optimisation” and “SEO Doctors: Educating our Clients” it is clear that many times clients ideas on how to “optimise” their website may not necessarily be what we know should be done. What I haven’t touched on though is the difference in priorities between web designers and SEOs. I say priorities because more often than not both parties acknowledge the work the other does though they of course give more emphasis on their expertise. As Justin shows us though, just like in real life what ought to be done is often the intersection of two opinions.

Web designers deal with the user interface and so have to focus on the aesthetics as well as the user experience. SEOs are concerned with search engine algorithms and so need to focus more on technical aspects. The thing though is that these two are not mutually exclusive and in fact should go hand in hand. As experience has shown as following good web design practices ends up benefiting SEO efforts and vice versa so there is no reason why web designers and SEOs shouldn’t work together to come up with what’s best for their clients’ sites.

To SEOs my advice would be to follow web design trends because as I said earlier following web standards for good design benefits SEO efforts most of the time. Do not wait for someone to confirm something you know to be good for users to be good for SEO too before you act on it. Stay on top of things. Search engines algorithms are constantly improved upon so you never know when they start factoring in better practices. And as search engines become more intelligent you can bet that with their aim to give users the best possible results they’ll be giving more weight to web design aspects.

a

SEO and Web Design: The Perfect Marriage