Best SEO

The mobile technologies are deeply impacting SEO industry lately. I predict that in a pretty short time the importance of mobile search would overcome social media in both terms of relevance and traffic volume. What changes does bring the growing mobile market?  There are several, but I would like to underscore one major change I’ve noticed with some of my sites, especially on ecommerce based ones, namely the quality of Bing traffic.

Personally, I am using Android on my mobile devices, which are based on Google search technology. However, our results show there is an increasing quality traffic from Bing. When we started optimizing our sites we didn’t initially pay a particular attention to Bing, which proved to be wrong, as Bing showed up fast its potential. I don’t have relevant data for other type of sites, but please take a look into the graph below, which shows revenue from each major player, including an AdWords campaign. Please notice that what appears to be a direct traffic seems to be mostly related to PPC campaigns:

You may easily notice the power of Bing on this site, which actually has taken the lead on organic search.  But a VERY interesting thing is that in terms of absolute traffic figures, Bing looks almost ridiculous, however it is the best income provider!!!

I let you draw more conclusion from this raw data, which is pretty fresh and real. You may imagine I can’t disclose the site’s URL.

Happy BINGing!

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We became quite accustomed to Google’s jumps from one algorithm changing to another. You may say that, WTF, Google is the master in his onw backyard. Yes, true, but internet it’s not quite a backyard and that intensely preached rich, memorable user experience that user is supposed to have might not increase as we or they may expect.

So, is it true, lots of so called internet marketers had become filling the web with spam and duplicate content, therefore constant changes in order to prevent them from turning SERPs into their own appendix were needed but it looks like this time there are lots of folks with legit complains against the recent changing.

The program change also appears to be touching extremely big websites with common stuff  pages, resembling E-commerce sites. As you know these kind of sites usually don’t have many IBLs and are  lost within million other web pages They also don’t have substantial quantities of exclusive content on them.

Look what Matt Cutts says:

What’s next?  I you look on webmaster tools, you can see that for a couple of months Google introduced the number the impression responding to a query and the number of clicks those impressions get; based on those 2 figures we can easily calculate the CTR (here is the example with this site ):

Search queries

Probably, in the near future, google will ranks sites similar to Ad Ranks on Adwords and will assign a quality score to each keyword.

Please let me know what do you think about this, thanks in advance

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It has been a while while Microsoft and Yahoo have announced a 10-year internet search partnership in an endeavor to take away users from search giant Google.  What’s going to transform for the field of search engine optimization after this Yahoo and Bing transaction.  While Google has no plans to change the user interface like what Microsoft has done with Bing, it is said that Caffeine will change the way Google search indexes, crawls and ranks the search results, making it much better than it is at the present.  Microsoft Bing rolls out more new features Real time search extended, Foursquare added to Maps Microsoft introduced new features to its Bing search engine together with Quick Tabs, an Answer box, and new mapping tools powered by Foursquare to deliver real-time data embedded in maps. The improved search functionality saves users a bit of time by helping them get to where they’re going faster.

Microsoft previewed quite a lot of new features for their search engine at the Search Engine Strategies 2010 Conference in New York , highlighting foursquare integration and new design ideas. For instance, unlike the simple Google interface, Bing results include a list of links for enhancing your search.

Microsoft has incorporated foursquare’s widespread location-based data for a real-time experience with Bing Maps.  Microsoft hopes to incorporate much more significant data into the Bing search experience-an effort you can already see being experienced.  Microsoft executives have been transparent about their intentions to pursue bold measures to disrupt Google’s dominant place in the search market.  Microsoft and Google have considerable weight, and it is not at all clear how Microsoft will handle its “low cost” and bundled search products.

Microsoft hopes to incorporate much more significant data into the Bing search experience-an effort you can already see being tested.  Users can anticipate all of these updates to be rolled out before the weather goes bad again, and our best deduction is they’re interesting enough to gain the search engine a few more fans.  In the world of search and discovery, there aren’t many viable examples that give users the information they didn’t know.

In addition to some sunshine, the next few months are going to see interesting updates from Bing.  For example, unlike the simple Google interface, Bing results incorporate a list of links for enhancing your search.  Modifying the user customizable Bing Search Preferences for basic personalization of search engine results.

So, who’s going to win?  Hard to say… but the battle is keen… It’s obvious that end user will benefit after all of this competition. We are looking forward to see new features from the 3 search engines giants.

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As I am working for a while as a SEO expert and PPC professional, I would like to share with you some basic facts that I learned in a live environment. You may search and find a lot of theory about SEO on the Web and you can even conduct your own successful SEO without too much of investment. However, I’ve noticed that there is a boundary for a self teaching person, and that’s not because of lack of ability of that person, but rather because of lack of information. I must ascertain that there are on the Web lots of contradictory theories regarding SEO, which makes even harder for a newbie to get to the right point on this area without a minimum of experience.

Why 3 layers?  And why layers, term that make us think of design or even programming?  Well, because though everybody seems to know the difference between on page and off page seo, not every single person gets the right relationship between these 2 and the 3 one, which is traffic they finally would like to generate, or – even more specific – money.

I. ON PAGE LAYER

OK, there is a lot of stuff on the internet about how to do on page seo as it should. Let me pinpoint some of the major mistakes “self seo professionals” do:

1. Title: even at the faster glance it’s obvious that most sites don’t have the proper titles. And am not referring to the html source, where title must be the first tag after opening page tags, but the title’s structure across the site.  There are basic rules to be followed for the title.

Remember:

a. Keyword frequency

Frequency is the number of times your keyword is used in the analyzed area of the page.

Example: If the page’s first heading is ‘Get the best ABC services provided by ABC Company’, frequency of keyword ‘ABC’ in the heading will be two. Frequency relates only to the exact matches of a keyword. Therefore, frequency of key phrase ‘ABC services’ will be one, because as exact match, this keyword is used only once.

Search engines use frequency as a measure of keyword importance.

Search engines rate pages with more keywords as more relevant results, and score them higher. However, you should not use too many keywords, since most search engines will penalize you for this practice for being seen as an attempt to artificially inflate rankings.

b. Keyword weight (density)

Keyword weight is a measure of how often a keyword is found in a specific area of the Web page like a title, heading, anchor name, visible text, etc. Unlike keyword frequency, which is just a count, keyword weight is a ratio.

Keyword weight will depend on the type of keyword, that is if the keyword is a single word or phrase. If the keyword includes two or more words, for example, ‘ABC services’, every word in the key phrase (i.e. both ‘ABC’ and ‘services’) contributes to the weight ratio in the weight formula, and not as one keyword (‘ABC services’).

Keyword weight is calculated as the number of words in the key phrase multiplied by frequency and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword).

Example: The title of a Web page is ‘Get Best ABC Services’. Keyword weight for ‘ABC services’ is 2*1/4*100%=50%. If you reduce the number of words in the title by removing the word ‘get’, so the title becomes ‘Best ABC Services’, than the keyword weight will be larger: 2*1/3*100%=67%. Finally, if you only keep ‘ABC Services’ in the title, the keyword weight will become 100% — 2*1/2*100%.

So, to increase the keyword weight, you should either add some more keywords or reduce the number of words in the page area. The proportion of the keywords to all words will become larger, so will the keyword weight.

Many search engines calculate keyword weight when they rank pages for a particular keyword. Normally, high keyword weight tell search engines that the keyword is extremely important in the text; however, a weight that is too high can make search engines suspect you of spamming and they will penalize your website’s rankings.

c. Keyword Prominence

Prominence is another measure of keyword importance that relates to the proximity of a keyword to the beginning of the analyzed page area. Being the keyword that is used at the beginning of the Title, Heading, or on top of the visible text of the page is considered more important than other words. Prominence is a ratio that is calculated separately for each important page area such as a title, headings, visible text, anchor tags, etc.

HTML pages are written in a document-like fashion. The most important items of a document’s visible text are placed at the top, and their importance is gradually reduced towards the bottom. This idea can be also applied to keyword prominence. Normally, the closer a keyword to the top of a page and to the beginning of a sentence, the higher its prominence is. However, search engines also check if the keyword is present in the middle and at the bottom of the page, so you should place some keywords there too.

The prominence formula takes the following factors into account:

i. Keyword positions in the area,

ii. Number of words in the keyword, and

iii. Total number of words in the area.

100% prominence is given to a keyword or keyphrase that appears at the beginning of the analyzed page area.

Ok, this recommendations are taken randomly from a desktop SEO optimizer, but it look like everybody writes about but very few follow them.

2. Headings

Your pages must have a h1 tag and a well defined headings structure. This is one of the most overlooked on page seo rules.

3. Semantics

The SEs are looking for the theme of the page rather for the keywords. Keywords are only indicators for the theme. Their density has a certain importance, but it’s rather about context than isolated keywords.

4. Internal links

Too much javascript may keep away good rankings on SERPs. SEs can read it, but don’t rely on that.

5. HTML errors

You may not realize the impact of too many html errors on SEs. That causes pages to load slow and DOM errors may puzzle the spiders.

II. OFF PAGE LAYER

I may refer it as a layer, as long as SEs see external links as a part of the target site. In my previous post I said, somewhat metaphorical, that SEO is going to die in a certain regard, as more complex search optimizations replace it. But, on the other hand, I believe, based on what a IT system means, that search engines are going to survive and rule the internet long time since now on. Actually, technically speaking, you cannot replace the role of a search engine, as you cannot put anything else instead of a database. Therefore, different types of marketing will come and pass but they all will gravitate around SEs. There is the new trend with SMM (social media marketing), VSO (video search optimizing) and so on, but they all rely ultimately on a kind of search engine. And you cannot get rid of Google, Bing or Yahoo (as some folks would want to) because of the simple fact: they have (1) technology and (2) the know how, the human resources, the intelligence.

So think of Search Engines as of a very large database to which users send queries for relevant results. Please have in mind that SEs treat each user as his own client, which means will do their best to provide meaningful results. We are clear so far with FROM clause and SELECT query but what about WHERE clause? Or ORDER BY?  Order by what?  This is where off page seo comes in place. You would be amazed if you saw how many entities are trying to spam the SEs index. Behind the scenes, there is an ongoing battle between spammers and SEs. Why?  Simple, because for many of them good rankings mean money. So, a few words about the 3^rd layer, the money layer.

III. THE MONEY LAYER

Called real traffic by some folks   You know, when a site owner asks for seo, he/ she actually is not that much interested in links, tags or whatever technical term, but only to be on top of SERPs. I explained in one of my previous posts why pure SEO cannot reveal as an isolated method certain ranking factors, as there are some other variables as well as players. SEO is not like playing a ball against a wall but playing with a real, opposite (from market share prospective) opponent. So, you are in a game where each player wants to outsmart you.

According to my experience, I dare to affirm that internet is a very large and there is still place for everybody. If you are smart enough, you may pinpoint your niche and see your business easily growing. However, if you want a large piece of pie, you must exercise your “muscle” and invest some big buck before feeling the taste of success.

Am going to talk more about the money layer in one of my future posts. The idea is that not all traffic is money traffic and that users may move back and forth on your site without bringing much value or profit to your business if you don’t know how to play this game.

So, have in mind that traffic doesn’t mean necessary money, leads and conversions and that SEO itself brings traffic only as a “secondary effect”, as it’s not its main goal.

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SEO and major players

Recently, a number of web market specialists came up with some puzzling assertion: SEO is dead! Let’s take a look behind the curtains and try to find out what lies behind their declarations. In one of my recent previous posts on this blog I said that SEO – the way we knew it – would die soon. Major players like Google, Bing and Yahoo reacted somewhat slow and with no appropriate strategy to the recent configuration of the Web. Yahoo has had for a while some community centered approach, Bing is quite new on the scene and Google had a powerful community but rather for the initiated users than for average web surfer. Yahoo strengthened, step be step, on quite a regular basis, the social side of its service, while Google extended the concept of its own social media, trying to mimic/ follow the social media trends.

http://videos.webpronews.com/2010/03/11/the-death-or-redefinition-of-seo-discussed/

But there is a new factor that we should take into account by now: mobile search and mobile apps. Java ME and similar platforms made it a piece of cake for developers to build their own search apps even to implement new web search algorithms. Some of the relies on Google API but some others are building their onw search engines and web databases.  All 3 SEs giants are doing well on this  round, as they launched their own mobile gadgets (read: mobile devices) and apps in order to stand out the rising competition and enforce positions on the market.

Theoretically, Microsoft had a major advantage, at least from the start, but maybe at this point Apple took the lead with iPhone and iPad, though Google is doing well with Android and Nexus.

Why SEO turns to SO

Till now, it was pretty easy to optimize for SEs a site, even after the meta tags were out of equation: it was all about some standard on page items and inbound links (IBLs). Now, we can clearly see how the search market became fragmented, each player striving to get the best slice of the pie. Big companies understood quite fast the importance of the newcomers and built consistent strategies for all search environments. This is why some folks talk now about Search Optimization instead of Search Engine Optimization. However, those who claims the death of SEO, tend to forget that SEs are smart enough to control (which is index) the content of any major web player. At a certain point, maybe social media leaders  will try to control tighter the access of SEs to their content, or even to deny it and build their own SEs. Would that be a smart move for them?  Hard to say… Same story with mobile search apps.

What we should do

It’ obvious at this point that SEO became rather Search Optimization (SO), in order to keep up with the evolution of Web. IMO, it’s less probable that Social Media will try to get rid of SEs. Even if there are lots of search web apps, the capacity of Google, Bing and Yahoo of gathering and sorting data is huge and cannot be beaten easily by whatever  comer. Therefore, on page optimization and good content will still be the backbone for ranking well on any kind of search, as all search service providers will want to provide relevant results for their clients. Even without internal PageRank, back links are good, as they increase the traffic and visibility of a site. Placing more content on social media sites, media centered portals (video and photo especially) it’s a good choice for SO and will definitely reflect on SEs.

My personal belief is that social media is a bubble which is not going to last too long, at least in it’s actual format, but Search Engines are the strong entities and they are going to rule the web long time from now on.

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Search Engine Optimization is a part of web site marketing, aiming to achieve the best results from search engines. Optimizing for search helps to define the target and focus the web content as well as internal structures that provide maximum exposure for search engines.

Nowadays, most people asking for SEO rush into what they think is the best SEO strategy: getting inbound links (IBLs), getting over the most important aspects of SEO, which is on page optimization. If you are familiar with database queries (SQL) you will easier understand how a SE respond to a query. The issue on stake is data retrieval, given the nature of uncontrolled heterogeneous documents on the web. When a user type a query into a search engine, the database is scanned for pages that may be relevant to that query. You may see it as a multiple join query on tables like ‘doc index’,  a pre-sorted data retrieved from index, PageRank, lexicon, each table being on its turn filled with sorted data. So, even if we are told by Google that internal PageRank is one of approximately 200 factors, the Google SE anatomy shows us a more or less 20% weight of PR.

But this leads us to the importance of relevancy of a term within a web document and underscores the magnitude of  on page SEO. So, let’s have a recapitulation of basic SEO principles:

1. The best timing for SEO is at the same time with the web site design;
2. On page factors are residing in head and body of the web page;
3. Each page should focus on 1 -3 keyword phrases. This allow the web site to achieve a high relevance, very important factor, as I mentioned  previously – each page on site should be about a distinct topic;
4. All on page factors are equally important;
5. Usability and accessibility are always important SEO guidelines; optimize for users, not for SEs;
6. HTML elements have no negative impact on SEO, except special elements, like anchors, alt tags or whatever element  containing major errors;
7. Don’t try to game search engines, it won’t work. Black hat seo is just a term invented for short time frauds, as they cannot last long;
8. It is important to repeat certain expression, but not abuse them, as may lead to keyword stuffing suspicion, which is penalized on SEs;
9. Link effectively, not abundantly – avoid JavaScript links and HTML links with special attributes;
10.  Use on page factors wisely, as title, meta tags, headings, body and footer area, bold keywords, alt attributes and remember that page structure is also important. Use a sitemap, robots txt, avoid “bad neighborhood”, don’t place too many links on one page and use a different name for “home” anchor text (usually your domain name).

OK, be sure that if you use wisely all these factors, it would be one of the most effective marketing strategies with the highest ROI of all methods. Questions?  Don’t hesitate to ask!

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Introduction

Site owners or Internet professionals have noticed lately rapid and deep transformations in all aspects related to web marketing, especially during last year. The social media boom, profound algorithm changes in Search Engines face the industry with a few important challenges for the near future: what role will play the social media in the future? Will Google see its market share shrinking? These are maybe the most general questions we can pose about the ongoing process.

Social Media? What?

Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many).  Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking.  Social media includes YouTube, Photobucket, Flickr, and other sites aimed at photo and video sharing.  Social media will become an increasingly important medium for global brands to market toward oversea consumers.  social media is a long term relationship, based on trust, and trust is the key to long relation between for example, a customer and a brand.  Social media begins to look less social’ might be true to provide simple, faster, and respect to the exclusivity.

Social Media and Marketing

Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites.  SMO is a subset of social media marketing, which is promoting and publicizing products and services in general through social media.  Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.  Social Media marketing is rapidly earning a role in the integrated marketing mix of small and enterprise businesses and as such, it’s transforming every division from the inside out. For many marketers, social networks and applications were their biggest priority for their 2010 marketing plans, followed closely by digital infrastructure.

Twitter and Facebook

In reality Twitter is only used by a very small percentage of people, the rest of the registered users are dormant.  Now that Google and other search engines are displaying real time feeds from Twitter and Facebook in the search results, brands need to understand the implications.  Big brands and publishers are trying to have it all: they love the immensity of the Facebook and Twitter populations, but they also are beginning to understand the power of leveraging the passion of their native audiences on their own properties.  Niche social platforms will need to work on mobile, Facebook and Twitter to gain major traction.  Many agencies are already using Twitter and Facebook for crisis communications.  Most companies use Twitter as a PR machine, covered in a thin veil of down-home personalization.  Most marketers are using Twitter to simply drive more traffic to their web site.  With Twitter and Facebook updates appearing in Google search results, many businesses are trying to figure if this is good or bad—and what to do next.

Social Media and Business

Increasingly smart businesses are integrating social media participation as part of their knowledge management strategy. Social Media marketing is rapidly earning a role in the integrated marketing mix of small and enterprise businesses and as such, it’s transforming every division from the inside out.  Trying to mix business in a social environment has its implications depending on how companies use it or should we say abuse it.  What corporations are seeking are ways to enable faster, cheaper collaboration among employees for business benefit.  Social media is forcing an integration of work and play, in business.

Search Market

Social Media optimization is considered an integral part of an online reputation management (ORM) or Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM) strategy for organizations or individuals who care about their online presence.  SMO is one of two online methods of optimizing (attracting visitors to) website content; the other method is search engine optimization (SEO).  Similar to Search Engine Optimization, SMO employs social media tactics to drive more users to your website, provides mor.  Here’s a summary of three recent research findings covering the benefits of social media marketing, how forums help brands and how businesses are employing social media marketing.  With Social Media Systems’ Internet Marketing, Website Design and Viral Video Publishing System, we can get your message on top of the world (including Google organic search) within hours; on a tiny budget.  When comparing social media traffic to other forms of traffic, such as search engine, the numbers typically are going to look rather bleak.  Because social media websites can be leveraged for links and better search rankings, they can greatly increase your site’s income potential.

Google

Google has its own social network long before the other guys popped up, and includes email, personalized page, youtube, blog network, google groups etc.  Many specialists suspected at a certain point that Google would try to impede somewhat the growing of the social media giants but actually, on the contrary, Google ranked them very well and has integrated the in the new search algorithm. It is pretty obvious that the new entrants keep at least an eye on Google pie: it’s a kind of normal, they have grown and their appetite is growing fast. Personally I think that biting from that pie could cause them indigestion or make them broke their teeth before even swallowing a bite, but maybe they want to build their onw bakery

Instead of Conclusion

So, give Caesar what belongs to Caesar, I mean to Google, and use Social Media for good causes. Even if people like me cannot see how long will last in its actual form a medium that aggregate heterogeneous mass of people, who barely know each other, they may find in – spite of me – their own ways.

Are you a web marketer? Come to me and I can buy for you 100.000 followers on Facebook or Twitter. Sure, am kidding you, but you can easily find people doing that on the web. It’s Social Media good or bad?  I don’t know, I let you find yourself the answer

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As a Web developer I contributed to the construction of many Web sites. There are quite a few I worked on as my individual projects. This was my initial job, developing sites based on a multitude of technologies. The inside vision acquired from that perspective was a good start for SEO. Many site owners have difficulties in understanding that the basic part of SEO relies on the technical part, actually is mostly technical. Search Engines work with algorithms (which in fact are a set of standardized finite set of instructions) and there is nothing mystical within them. Sure, they don’t fully disclose all criteria on which is founded the algorithm, but analyzing the effects can be deducted.

Generally, since I am doing SEO, clients seem to pertain to one of two categories:
1. they don’t understand much; this is a result driven category and it’s easy to deal with them;
2. people that think they know everything about SEO., sometimes difficult to cope with.

As I mentioned in my previous post, there are several factors influencing rankings. I also underscored that SEO mustn’t be the main marketing strategy. This is a major mistake in SEO, confusing SEO with SEM (Search Engine Marketing). We are told: we want “x” number of back links (IBLs) on pages with an internal PageRank higher than “y”. Ouch!  Lately, the new trend is to ask IBLs from blog comments with internal PageRank +x of the comments page itself,  not site’s PR!  More than that, the page should not have more than 20 OBLs (outbound links). Gush, SEO has nothing to do with this habits, though it is clear that sites need incoming links (as much as possible one way). Remember: Search Engines can easily detect clustering sites, when there is an attempt to cross-link them, which lead to no link juice, so don’t try to build “link wheels” or similar strategies based on urban myths.  It is important to understand that links should be built as if search engines either don’t exist or don’t evaluate links.

Linking relationships between sites help Search Engines to find new content and determine how reputable the content might be. That provide value beyond Search Engine Optimization. A SEO campaign have to be one part of a broader online marketing strategy. Search Engines look at links and might pass or might not pass value. A non-indexed Web site cannot pass value or the page itself may be conceived so as to pass as little value as possible.

A few terms that describe the value links can pass would be:
1. Visibility – pathway to content;
2. Anchor text – links enhance relevance;
3. Traffic – links on high traffic pages tend to send traffic to their destinatioss;
4. Trust – shows that desitnation should be trusted;
5. Link Weight – called internal PageRank by Google.

Many people wrongly beliee that Link Weight (PR) is crucial to SEO but PR has considerably less impact on Search Engines visibility than people tend to think.

The IBLs are definitely overrated. Most backlinks don’t help with SEs result rankings because of a variety of reasons. They may not pass anchor text, or they not be trusted, or their anchor text might be irrelevant to specific queries. The PR a page can get from a large number of links (IBLs) may help with some search result rankings but most of PR makes little difference on search results (SERPs).

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It looks like once Google Caffeine kicks in, spammy SEO companies get kicked out of the field. This was the logical consequence of already visible in caffeine avatars, e.g., real time or vertical SERPs.
Does it mean links are less important by now?  Remember, this was and will be true for present or future SEO:

Links pass value through:
- traffic;
- visibility;
- crawling;
- trust;
- anchor text;
- PageRank.

We should also recall what influence SERPs:
- what you do with your site;
- what other people do with their sites;
- what Search Engines do with their data, and
- what users are searching.

Google Caffeine will be more than Google’s an update. Google Caffeine is a great tool for advertising and it has lots of potential, it will open new marketing strategies for drawing.  If you?ve been monitoring your sites rankings in Google Caffeine you might expect your site to appear at same position in Google… Wrong, Caffeine puzzled the world most searched terms.

In a broader sense, Google Caffeine is due to the power kept by Social Media, power on what we call now news. Now news is news with high search traffic that is likely to be held on that day or at most a week. Google Caffeine is definitely about current fresh content.  Any overhaul of a Google Algorithm must not be taken lightly by SEO companies: it will have a great effect on SEO and current rankings.

Google Caffeine is  a demonstration that Google is striving to be the best in search while still watching users feedback. Check out this: if you have broken links on your website, get ready to kiss your Google rank goodbye!!! Start checking all your links now to be ready for the change over.

Google Caffeine is a new indexing structure of Google which aims to improve the user’s searching experience. It will be focused on serving up new and more relevant search results. New emphasis will be placed upon certain key website elements.

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What is Personalized Search
Web search engines are the second most frequently used online computer application. Not long ago, most software applications did not contain a search module. Personalized search has been around for years. Expanding the people who get personalized results changes things some, but it’s not revolutionary. Personalized search has so far hidden the benefits. I wonder if the best way to proceed would be for search engines to explicitly note certain results that come from personalization. Personalization in search is designed to make organic and algorithmic search results more relevant.

Personalization in search has become a much bigger emphasis over the last couple of years. And of course being logged in isn’t the only way they could identify a computer.  However, natural search does not exist in isolation.

Information directly gathered from the user is very powerful for tailoring a search session to the specific user. Information about the quality and quantity of links to a page can be used by search engines to get a sense of implied importance of the page being linked.

Personalized search adapts itself, showing different results to different people based on their past behavior . Personalized search tries to disambiguate intent by using information not only about what you are doing now, but also what you did in the past. Personalized search is intended to improve the quality and utility of search results. If I search for “boot” I am probably looking for footwear. Personalized search has been around for awhile anyway, with favorite’s lists and browser histories. So if you’ve come across a doomsday article or two predicting that “the Internet sky is falling,” don’t worry.

Google has become a default behavior. It can save you time when typing your query if you happen to be searching for something that a lot of others have searched for before you. Google has extended its personalized search functionality To users that are not even signed in. This goes for Google users around the world, in more than 40 languages.

However, users who do not want their searches being used by Google to create personalized search results have the option to opt out of the program by visiting the opt out page. This will prevent personalized search results for logged out users in Google Search. Users don?t know what they don?t know, and the false sense of confidence can get some people in hot water. I recall reading about a person following a Google Map into a pond. Users can visit a fairly innocuous page to customize what Google considers interest categories.

SEO and Personalized Search
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to optimization of your website for certain key words, thereby improving the website’s visibility and the incoming traffic, conversion rates and profits.
Social-driven engines can be gamed, which is bad if you’re trying to do research. Obviously, relevance means different things to different people, so I think we’ll start to see a lot of fragmentation of search traffic as more search options appear. Social marketing is related to link bait, because it allows it to spread. But it is more than just link baiting.

Personalized search, in the longer term, will likely afford them that. Personalized search might even give your website a boost thanks to some of the criteria that will manipulate the SERPS. Your operation might be closer from a geographical aspect, or the searcher might be clicking back from the larger websites and sticking on the smaller more niche sites. Personalized search has the potential to represent a vicious cycle – users will click on the top results because they’re at the top, and these results will continue to be at the top because users clicked on them.

Is this the solution?
Some folks say personalized search is the solution to the flaws in pagerank and link popularity that we have all been manipulating for so long. If you are an SEO, for sure you see it coming. Personalized search isn’t going anywhere and we need to understand the seo implications of personalization . As long as Google doesn’t rerank things too much I’m fine with the idea of personalization and see how it can deliver better results. Personalized search isolates the user in his/her own little Googly world.

Personalized search basically means showing search results that are more relevant, and these search results are shown on the basis of users’ past search / browsing behavior observed by Google. Now, even if you’re not logged in to your Google Account and/or even if you don’t have a free Google Account, Google will show you personalized search results when you search any term at Google Search. Personalized search occurs when the search engines deliver results based on your personal search or web site visit history. With Google’s recent enabling of a “web history” feature, giving them permission to store your web site visit and search engine history, they are introducing results that are based on your own experience, presumably providing you with a set of results that is more in line with your interests. Personalized search is here and it’s here to stay. With the recent move by Google to make personalized search a default setting, and the multitude of patents from all the major search engines, the complexity of SEO has increased significantly.

Personalized search is forcing SEO’s to do what they should have done along all along. Personalized search adds more uncertainty to the issue. PPC might actually work better in terms of stability. Personalized search is back and with a bang promising a unique future online with its specially tailored search for each and every individual

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