Seo Guide

In addition to collecting a lot of information about the Web by using crawling programs to index content across the internet, search engines can learn a lot about pages and images and videos and other objects on the web by watching what we choose when we search, by seeing how we browse web pages through their toolbars, and by noting what words we might choose when we annotate and tag images and pages.

As publishers of text and links and pictures, as users of web pages, and as interactive participants on pages when leaving comments and tags and annotations, we provide search engines with information about our interests and what we might be interested in seeing on the Web.

As those search engines learn about us and our interests from the pages that we like to visit and the images and text that we might publish, they can compare what we see and what we do online with other travelers and publishers on the Web, and they might view us as communities who may share some common interests, and whom they can learn from.

Search engines pay attention to the links that publishers of pages point towards other pages, and the words within those links to help define what pages might be about.

A large number of patent filings and white papers from search engines also describe how search engines may be looking data about how people search and the query terms that they use, what pages they might visit and spend time upon, and even searchers’ past searching and browsing and bookmarking activities, to determine what pages to show those searchers in response to queries entered into search boxes.

It’s interesting to see some specific examples of how user information might be used by a search engine to provide rankings for searches.

Ranking Landmark Images at Flickr

I recently wrote about a Microsoft patent that discussed some ways that images taken from Web pages might be ranked in image searches for specific keywords, in the post How Do Images Get Ranked in Image Search?

While the authors of that patent filing described some very interesting approaches to determining what images where about and how to rank them, they did so in the context of pictures found on Web pages.

Imagine instead, trying to understand what images are about in a place like Flickr, where a lot of meta data is captured for those pictures - titles, descriptions, tags from people posting and viewing images, and even automatically generated tags that might provide information such as the location where the picture was taken.

A recent paper from Yahoo researchers, Generating Diverse and Representative Image Search Results for Landmarks, explores some interesting ways to rank and provide images that involve the use of community input and visual analysis of images. The authors start the paper with the question:

Can we leverage the community-contributed collections of rich media on the web to automatically generate representative and diverse views of the world’s landmarks?

What is exciting about this work is that a process like the one described in the paper might be very useful in standard web-based image search engine, which the authors note in the conclusion of the paper.

Two Stages

For a system like this to work well over such a large body of images, it needs to be able to work in an automated manner.

Since this work focuses upon landmarks at specific locations, only images with locations associated with them were used. There are more than 40,000,000 public geotagged images at Flickr. Some were automatically tagged with a location with the use of location-aware cameraphones and GPS integrated cameras, while others were tagged with a location by the people who uploaded them.

The first stage involved looking at the tags and location metadata associated with the images to cluster the pictures together that represent landmarks or geographic features.

The second stage involved applying visual analysis to images associated with discovered landmarks, so that representative sets of images could be extracted for each landmark.

By clustering images by tags at the beginning, the process of comparing images to see how similar they might be in the second stage involves much less work because only images from the same landmarks or geographic areas are then being compared.

Clustering Visually Similar Photos

There were a few rules followed in the process of clustering together photos from landmarks identified by tags from community members who took the pictures and uploaded them to Flickr. The authors tell us that the following assumptions were at the core of those rules:

(1) A cluster would contain photos taken from many different users, indicating that there is a broad interest in the subject shown in the photos,

(2) There would be some amount of visual cohesiveness in the images - in other words, people were finding the same things about the scenes at the locations interesting, with the same objects being photographed or the same type of photos being taken, and;

(3) The group of photos would be distributed relatively uniformly in time - showing that there was an interest in the landmark itself, and not a specfic event that happended at the landmark’s location.

Conclusion

Community input in tagging, along with geotagged locations was an important first part of this process, helping to identify landmarks.

Information about the community and the pictures that they took also played an important role in clustering images - numbers of people taking pictures from similar view points over time.

The paper does cover some additional technical aspects of the ranking of images, but I think one of the key takeaways from this paper is how information about individuals and communities can be a key factor in identifying landmarks and finding images that represent important and diverse views of those landmarks.

It’s interesting to consider some of the ways that user data may play a role in ranking other things on the web, such as videos, businesses in a business search, and web pages in web search. Will the roles of communities become larger and larger?

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Well, I’ve mentioned this before as well so here is the new theme with tons of glitches and bugs (that I’ll workout, of course), there are going to be alot more new additions to blueverse then just the theme and the new type of ads, here is a list of the things that I’m working on currently.

1. Store (ebooks,scripts and more stuff to make money off of)
2. Services - I’ll be providing quite a few services related to wordpress development and marketing.
3. More Free Stuff - There’s gonna be alot more free stuff then there was before.
4. Alot more things, I’d rather keep this a surprise.

The new theme is still filled with bugs, bugs that I’ll fix as i find them, so please lemme know when you find something wrong with the template

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For last couple of years, Yahoo! has been the preferred destination for Internet users all over United States. However, according to Search Engine Journal Google now reigns supreme not only as the country's most trafficked website, but also as the most popular search engine in the entire United States.

In a recent comScore ranking, since April 2008 Google for the first time has been able to surpass Yahoo's figures of monthly visitors and have claimed the throne of 'The King'. However, now all eyes are turned towards May 2008 results, as it is being speculated that Yahoo! might make a dash for a comeback in top position. The loss of the top spot might be a bit hard to digest for Yahoo! at this time, as it is reeling from the pressure of take over bids and trying to resurrect whatever is left of the company after the Microsoft-Yahoo! fiasco.

According to the ranking results, Google's audience in April was 141.1 million, depicting an increase of 18% from the same time last year. Yahoo! also had an increase of 7%, which brought its traffic statistics to 140.6 million. However, inspite of several new launches and updates, Microsoft still ended at the third place with $121 million.

But, Yahoo! still beats Google in respect to page views with quite a big margin. For April 2008, Yahoo! recorded 33.6 billion page views and Google was quite far behind with just 28.7 billion.

We just have to wait and see the results for May 2008 ranking results. It is going to be close race.

There is a new concern at the Webmaster World with many Webmasters reporting that Google is showing their 'robots.txt file' in its SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). Although, it shouldn't pose any threat, still there is considerable concern over this latest development. However, some other Webmasters are simply considering this display as an anomaly and believe that this won't be affecting websites and rankings in any ways.

Here are some interesting excerpts from the ongoing conversation at Webmasters World:

“Title says it all really. Any ideas why? It only seems to be affecting one of my sites. Can't see anything I might have done different with this one over the others.“

“From what I can see, Google shows 182,000 robot.txt files in their index - [inurl:robots.txt filetype:txt] is the query I was studying. By posting that specific query, I am making an exception to our usual policy of "no specific searches", but I feel it is generic enough - there are no keywords involved - to allow an exception in this case.

My guess is that somewhere, someone has linked to these robots.txt specific files - including yours, most likely. Certainly the top results for that query are robots.txt files that I know have been linked to - including ours here at WebmasterWorld. Google should simply drop all robots.txt files from their index, IMO - but we're the tail trying to wag the dog on this kind of thing. How is this causing you a problem, Mike? Is your robots.txt actually ranking on a keyword query?

At any rate, this does bring up the crazy question, how can you remove a robots.txt file from Google's index? If you use robots.txt to block it, that would mean that googlebot should not even request robots.txt - an insane loop. And of course, you don't use meta tags in a robots.txt file.

Unless this is some kind of a problem on keyword queries, I'd suggest you just chalk it up to strange and move on.”

“You never know if it is causing a problem with Google. Wondered if it was a side effect of something bad. We were the victim of a server hack (someone uploaded p*rn images into every page) two weeks ago, then last week someone linked to 1000+ pages that did not exist on the site (yes, Google indexed them too as duplicate content even though they had noindex/nofollow tags) so I wondered if this was the latest ranking attack by our competitors.“

“You can try adding this in your .htaccess file:

<filesmatch "robots\.txt">
Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex, nofollow"

Then try again to remove with the Google Webmaster Tools "Remove URL".

Last month Yahoo! had launched Sitemap Explorer in United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland, much to the joy and satisfaction of UK users and Webmasters. However, Search Engine Journal is reporting that since yesterday Yahoo! is redirecting its UK users to uk.yahoo.com. It means that Yahoo! is automatically presenting the localized version of its homepage to all users from UK.

For example, when users in UK key in the Yahoo! homepage yahoo.com they are immediately redirected to uk.yahoo.com.

We can only imagine that this change is global in nature as there are a few reports at Webmaster World too stating that even in Germany this change can be seen . However, nothing has changed here, so we can't say anything for sure. But, if you find this change in your locations, do drop in and let me know. This is quite interesting. Locale Segregation.

Last week I had informed my readers about the launch of Google' translation service known as Google Translate. This service is Hindi specific and offers direct and automated translation of English text to Hindi. However, according to the Google Blog Google has added another 10 new languages to Google Translate's database, thereby bringing the total number of languages to 23. These newly added languages are Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish.

Apart from the language addition, Google Translate will also enable translation of text and web pages as well as users can now perform cross-language searches between any two languages that Google offers.

'Detect Language' option will help users automatically identify the language of the text that they are trying to translate. Even developers can benefit from these new additions by incorporating these languages in AJAX language API (Application Programming Interface).

This new update is going to be a huge help to a lot of people and would definitely be appreciated worldwide.

Posted by Glen Allsopp

There are over 200 million blogs online, thousands of review sites, sites specific to leaving feedback about companies, and thousands of forums on any topic imaginable.

People can talk about whatever they want, pretty much wherever they want, and with so many people "conversing online," a lot of that conversation is involving brands - their products, their services, and their business.  Knowing how to 'monitor' the web is a very valuable asset, and with that there are 3 types of mentions you can find around a brand online:

1. Positive
2. Neutral
3. Negative

Positive

This information is actually very valuable, as people won't always contact you directly to praise you. You may find out that your staff members are doing a good job or people really like a certain part of your product, which you may be able to include as a marketing angle.

Neutral

Neutral mentions of a brand aren't particularly useful, but they can be ones to watch. An example of a neutral mention is something like, "I bought a [product name] from [company name] today, hopefully It will work perfectly."These don't give you any indications of areas or that things may be going well or not-so well, but if you track the site (usually a blog or forum) then an updated feedback response may be imminent.

Negative

These are the ones that you need to pay the most attention to as they can really harm a company's reputation. Apple stock prices dropped $4bn in 2007 because of an inaccurate post on Engadget, the popular technology blog. Fortunately, Apple responded quite quickly to rectify the situation but it certainly left a dint in stock prices and their brand. 

How the Conversation Has Changed

Before the web, people relied on newspapers, radio, TV, and peer recommendations to help give them an overall view of a product or service before using it. Now, people can just "Google it" and find out exactly what others think of something before they give out their hard earned cash and possibly make a bad decision.

If you own a business that has any presence online, you must be monitoring what is being said about you; otherwise, you could run into some serious issues. You don't know when somebody is going to complain about one of your offerings and possibly affect your sales.

Who Sees the Negativity?

Negative mentions can be made in numerous places such as the following (who sees them):

• Forums (forum members)
• Blogs (blog subscribers)
• Micro-sites (search results)
• PPC ads (sites that display Adsense / search results)
• Review sites (search results)
• Social networks (site members)
• etc etc.

The problem is, almost all of these can be found in search results. So, not only will forums users find out something about a company, but there's a chance the mention will rank for the respective keywords and non-forum members will see the negativity.  

With that in mind, and because I'm writing a blog post for SEOmoz, I present:

To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the term 'owning your search results', but it is relevant and makes sense. Your brand name is probably one of the top referring keywords to your website, but for those who don't click on the result that is you, where are they landing?

Owning your search results is about having the top results in the search engines about you as something positive in order to stop people being 'put off' by what they find or people hijacking your brand. I have my own thoughts on the 'ethics' of this if you want to read more into that.

Amazon (result) and eBay (result) are both great examples of this; I advise you to look at their search results for an idea of how well organised results around a brand term can be. So, how can you start to achieve similar results?

 - Targeted Pages on Your Own site

For the majority of the people reading this, when people search for your name / brand term, you (as in a website you own / page you created) are going to be the first result. 

One way to get another result for this is to create a highly targeted page around the keywords.  For example, SEOmoz ranks for their name and has sitelinks, but a very optimised page around the SEOmoz brand (e.g., the About page or similar) may result in an indented listing like the example below:

What I actually prefer to focus on with these is specific pages around products or services. So for example, you may have a page about a product for sale that is quite popular. In order to get an indented listing for that product name you could create an FAQ or Images page separately that is highly targeted around the keywords.

 - Promote Positive Pages

This is quite straightforward, so I'm not going to ramble on when it can take 2 sentences to summarise. Basically, if there are positive pages around your brand that aren't in the top results, throw some backlinks their way to try and improve their rankings.

Just make sure that the person writing positively about you isn't going to remove that page anytime soon or replace it with something negative ;).

- Create Content on Other Sites

Before I start (and this is a point I always make but I'll say it again), please don't use the following in a spammy or unethical way. I'm talking about creating content on sites like Squidoo and Hubpages, and to be honest, when I was focused on affiliate marketing these were some of the sites I used for backlinks to help me in rankings. Needless to say, I never felt good about that so I promote their ethical usage as much as possible. 

What you can do on these sites is create highly targeted content on a subject of your choice, so of course you can create one around your brand or your industry. What I recommend though is creating a page that anyone can land on and benefit from.  Let's say that SEOmoz were creating a page around their brand on hubpages. It would be nice to see information about them, but a nice extra would be if there was an "SEO poll" or funny conference images that people could enjoy.

- Make Use of Sub-Domains

These are thought to be classed as a 'new domain' in a sense; therefore, these won't become indented below other results. If you took a look at the results for the Amazon and eBay searches, you will notice that the majority of results are sub-domains on their site. Such things you could use one for include:

• Blog
• Forums
• Developer section
• Support section

- Promote Yourself

I see a lot of big brands with results that are from news sources or other popular websites. The reason these sites rank highly is because the domain generally has a lot of authority, and even just a mention of the brand name on a page can be enough to rank highly.

There's a great post about this over at 10e20 that I couldn't put any better.

- Profile Pages

These are not something I recommend creating in terms of defending your brand keywords; these are just a possible positive for taking part in niche websites. For a search around my company name you can see my Sphinn profile and possibly some forum profiles in the results.

These tend to do very well in results, but only register on these sites if you are actually going to use them. Sites like Aboutus.org also tend to rank very highly around brand terms because of the authority of the domain and the on-page optimisation / relevance each page has.  

In Summary

Negative search engine results can really affect a company's sales online, but sometimes those negative search results are deserved, especially if a company is offering shoddy services or a crappy product. You can never substitute being an honest and professional company for relying on hiding the negative from view.

My first YOUmoz post was terrible -- I look back at it now and feel embarrassed for writing it; therefore, I put a bit more effort into this one. If you want to know more about me, I write about the subject of online reputation management and all it entails (SEO, social media, communication) at the ViperChill blog.  

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Microsoft has updated its Live Search for Windows Mobile with some really cool and slick features. According to the Live Search Blog Microsoft in its last update had incorporated a feature that enabled a user to directly send feedback to the Live Search engineering team. Based on the feedbacks received, MSN has rolled out these features.

Weather: Much of the user feedback stressed on their wish to see weather statistics in their mobile devices. So now, just by clicking the Weather icon, a user will be able to view current weather conditions and a four-day weather forecast.

Web Search: All browsing capabilities such as search, news, images, and other services are now available to users on their mobile devices.

Traffic Updates: Streaming data from Live Search Maps, MSN will now provide users with almost real-time traffic information for cities likeDallas, Indianapolis, and Baltimore.

Bluetooth Headset Support: This hi-tech super-cool feature is available only on a few selected devices and would enable users to access the speech recognition feature directly through their wireless bluetooth headsets.

Community Collections: MSN has introduced community related content like the Virtual Earth Collections and Google KML , to help the user find what he is looking for.

As far as mobile users are concerned, these are really awesome features and would greatly enhance user accessibility. You can get m.live.com from your mobile device browser and try them out. I'm off to check these cool features. Enjoy!

Posted by LarsBachmann

I have received a lot of high quality information from SEOmoz, and now I think it's time to give something back. This is my first blog post on SEOmoz, and it's gonna be short, but worth reading.

You all know how fun it can be to create the perfect linkbait, and here is an easy way to do it. I made a post called "present game" (I'm not sure this is the right word in English, though). The whole idea is that you write a post saying that you wanna start a fun present game, and if you want to participate, just write a comment saying so.

And once you have some comments (that usually don't take long), you pick one and send the "winner" a present.

But here come the rules.

Indyour post, you write a list just like this:

1. (Link to your blogpost), then 2. 3. etc...

This can go as high as you want, but I made mine to 10.

And whoever receives the package has to copy the list and the rules made by you in his or her blog post, and then add the URL of the post on to the next number (in this case, number 2).

And then the winner writes a couple of words about the present you send them, and then encourages his or her readers to make a comment so that there can be found a new blogger who can receive the next present. I made my rules so that the last one on the list has to send a present back to the first on the list, and the value of the present has to be between $30-50 USD.

As this little fun game continuous, you will get a link on every blog that participates in the game because you are the first on the list. Imagine that you make this with a 100-list, then all you have to do is write a post, send a present to someone, and then just wait to receive 100 links and a present.

Good luck with your present/linkbait game ;)

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Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) conducted the SEMPO 2007 State of Market Survey, in which it found that about 80 % of the participating advertisers are more than willing to pay more for Behavioral Targeting. That in itself indicates towards a major shift in the Online Advertisement Spend Trend. The survey included the participation of 867 search engine advertisers and search engine marketing agencies

According to SEMPO, four out of five advertisers are not hesitant in increasing their online advertising budget to add behavioral targeting to their pay-per-click campaigns. Demographic targeting such as age and gender also saw a lot of willing takers, amounting to 57% of advertisers who were ready to spend more. On an average, advertisers are ready to increase their budget spending by 11% for both behavioral and demographic targeting. However, the actual investment in behavioral targeting is far lower than the interest shown in this field by the advertisers. 40% of the participants stated that as of now they aren't targeting or retargeting searchers, but they have been planning to do so in the next 12 months

Dayparting also showed a lot less interest by the advertisers. According to the survey, only 30% advertisers are interested in increasing their bids based on dayparting. In addition, 9% of advertisers confessed that the budget spending depended on their comfort levels.

According to Kevin Lee (Member SEMPO Board of Directors), “The next best thing to an impression or click from a search result is the ability to serve a highly relevant and targeted graphical or textual ad to a consumer while they are still very interested in their search. Online advertisers are always faced with the challenge that there is a finite number of searches occurring daily. Behavioral targeting gives advertisers an opportunity to expand the search marketing universe.”

This new developing trend in Online Advertisement Spending indicates a change of strategies by advertisers and will also compel online marketing companies to make some changes to their strategies as well.