For a company that remains constant in third place as far as the search engine users share goes, Microsoft needs to rethink it’s strategies on how to implement search engine algorithms. Having recorded only about 8.2 percent of the total U.S. internet search against Googles’ 64.2 percent truly is a basis for Microsoft to retrace their steps and if necessary revised their homegrown search engine, who knows they might even duplicate their feat of a come from behind catch up to the leading competitor.
This vision may become a reality after an unconfirmed report surfaced that Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s President, is preparing to unveil a new type of search engine that is said to have some helpful features. One of such feature is reported to be a categorising system that would separate search results per category. This is made possible by adding a menu panel on the left side of the screen where the categories will be presented in addition to past queries and related searches. According to the report from a confidential source, the search results will return a bulk of data that is related to the given query which will be ranging from the website URL, photos, images, reviews, blogs, locations where the product may be purchased and other pertinent data. These bulk of data returned will be placed in the left panel where each are categorised properly.
Microsoft really is making serious business out of the Search engine aspect because aside from this reported new search engine being worked-on, the company planned on acquiring the second place in the search engine category Yahoo, but to no avail. After the failed merger Microsoft employed several Yahoo executives to strengthen their search engine algorithm and marketing strategy. Executives like Qi Lu who now heads Microsoft’s online division, Sean Sutcher now heads Microsoft’s silicon valley Search technology center and Larry Heck who formerly was in charge of Yahoo’s! search and ads algorithms.
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The process of link building has been regarded as one of the most helpful and essential Search Engine Optimisation strategy to date. This is because of the fact that spiders have a very close affinity with links as it uses links to crawl through the different web pages in a website. In addition, links from an external website to your website is considered as a vote for your website which Google considers as a factor that will help affect your websites’ page rank or even your overall SERP. It is because of these reasons that link building is a very important integration in one’s own Search Engine Optimisation campaign. However, the process of link building is not an easy one because it has to conform to several criteria before it could be interpreted by the search engine as a valid “vote” or a valid link, this is to prevent the proliferation of spamming techniques and other black hat SEO strategies, in addition, these criteria would define a good link that could help your SEO campaign as compared to a link that does nothing to your SEO campaign.
The first criteria is that the linking website and the linked website should have similar or relevant contents with each other, this means that any website could just link to your website and vice versa. Your website theme or overall content must be relevant to the overall content of the other website otherwise your website will possibly be tagged as a link farm or a spam website which could ultimately cause your website to be suspended or banned.
Second criteria is that the link should be obtained from popular or well-ranked websites. Gaining a link to your website is a good start but if you are serious in making your website rank well you have to gain the link from a very popular website, this is due to the fact that link popularity or gaining a link from a popular website is one of the major ranking factor for Google, Yahoo and MSN.
A third criterion for consideration is the “age” of the website linking to your website. Search engines places more trust on websites that have been around for a long time and with a good search engine track record. The age determines the websites reliability which thus makes a link to your website from this website would ensure a high percentage of indexing or ranking your website.
These are factors that you might want to consider before starting your link building process; these factors will help you start the process of link building on the right side of the playing field.
The world of Search engine optimisation has been repeatedly viewed as not an exact science, there is not definite way or standard way of creating a fully optimised website design, rather, there should be constant research and constant trial and errors that has to be performed before your SEO campaign hits pay dirt. Up to this moment, one thing is sure in SEO and that is the presence and characteristics of search engine agents called the spiders. Knowing how spiders behave while crawling a website is one of SEO’s daunting tasks but having to “crack” how these spiders crawl the website is a big leap in one’s own SEO campaign. Thanks to SEO consultants and SEO companies worldwide the collaboration of knowledge has provided vital information on indeed how spiders crawl the different websites. It has been found out that spiders crawl the site through the links provided for in the website, a broken link with no back link will halt the spiders’ crawling process and will then return insufficient data to the main engine for processing which may cause the non-indexing or non-ranking of your website. In addition, spiders gathers data by crawling through the websites’ content, and to be more specific it was found that spiders crawl a web page from top left to bottom right.
The process of crawling from the top left page to the bottom right page of the website poses a problem to SEO companies and SEO consultants worldwide because of the fact that most common website design format is that of having the navigation bar at the left side of the web page an arrangement that can distort the crawling process by having spiders crawl all the links in the navigation bar first and may cause the ignoring of the web content. Imagine a table having two columns and three rows on the first column and one row on the second column, the first column containing the navigation links and the second column the content of the web page, in this arrangement the spider will then have to crawl all the links and will not be able to crawl the web content which contains the all important data for search engines, the keywords. Therefore to solve this type of problem you have to force the spiders to read the web content first before going back to the navigation links, remember that spiders have more affinity to links than to content. How do we exactly do this? We go back to our table example awhile ago, now this time we have to move the first navigation link to the second row instead of placing it on the first row, thus leaving a blank row in the first column, the second column would remain as is. This way having no link to read in the first column the spider then moves to the right and will be able to “see” the content of the web page where it would then resume the gathering of data.
Many people spend a lot on advertising their websites for directing the viewer traffic but how many of them become successful? The most popular search engines like MSN, Google and Yahoo, show the names of only ten websites if you hit them for any search. What makes those websites become placed in the first page of the search results? Are they just lucky and randomly selected by the search engine or there is some trick behind? The answer of all such questions that must have left you sleepless is Search Engine Optimisation or commonly known as SEO.
The rising awareness of internet has made it as one of the most cost effective way of reaching the masses. The internet is used by people of all age, group, sex and country! The publicity through internet can make any business lucrative! But how can you reach the masses with millions of competitors participating in the race? The simple formula to win is through SEO.
What is SEO
In a laymen language, the search engine optimisation written articles are rich in the keywords that could be used by most of the viewers to make a search. Like for example if a reader wants to search on some house keeping tips. What he will type in the search box will be some thing similar to “House keeping”, or “Cleaning The House”, or some thing like “spring cleaning”. The options are end less.
How To Get It
There are a number of professionals that are ready to deliver your SEO requirements. It is the most cost effective way of getting the audience attract towards your website. The professional mind working on it visualises with the concept of the client and utilise the keywords or a single word that are commonly used by internet users in search engines.
Moreover, the traffic can also be directed to your website by getting the website linked with some other websites. That means, if a user is viewing a site, he can be directed towards your website if you are having an attractive, introductory keyword rich, short write up written with a link to your site.
Creating an impressive website is easier than its spellings! This is true if you are designing the website following the below given principles.
Content
The website content is one way to invite traffic of visitors to your site. The write up should be simple and in the language understood by most of the targeted audience. You also have to take into consideration that no reader sits with a dictionary in hand. More over the articles should be concise. It should have catchy headlines that will help spark the reader’s interest. Pick headlines that are relevant to the whole website content.
Text Appearance
After deciding the content, the next step is how to make your website design appear attractive. There are a few do’s and don’ts that should be taken cared of when selecting the font size and other related format for the text. The text should be visible! The internet user will not hesitate in switching to other site, leaving your content unread if the text is of font size that is less than 12px. With the increase of screen resolutions, the font size 12px also looks small. Hence 14px becomes the ideal size of the font.
Do not ignore the spacing between the lines of the paragraph. The website designers call it “Line-Height”. It should be kept a little expanded thus making the text appear more readable.
Colours and Effects
Pick the colour schemes keeping in mind the theme behind the website. For example whites and greens as background colour works the best on health related websites while the fluorescent colours work wonders for ads selling sites. Though the simple colours are always pleasing to eyes there is still a need to use some secondary colours, please do not be generous with them.The colour of the background should be enhancing and not hiding the text.The use of the special effects like lens flares, drop shadows among others should be just appropriate. The over use of these effects makes the site look cluttered!
Now that you are aware of the key principles do not just start off creating the website on your photoshop app! Take some more time and look around some ideal examples suiting well to all the above points. That will help you to understand the secret behind a successfully created website design.
The battle for supremacy for the top spot among search engines was yet again taken by Google according to comScore’s April report. According to the report internet users conducted 14.8 billion online searches last April. The Mountain View based Google gained 64.2 percent last April which is higher by 0.5 percent compared to its March performance. To compare with the second ranking search engine Yahoo! which registers 20.4 percent last April which is down by 0.1 percent compared to the March’s result.
Despite this fall from Yahoo! it still ranks higher from other search engine competitors such as Microsoft Corporation which accounts for 8.2 percent of searches last April. Completing the top five search engine rankings are Ask Network which takes 3.8 percent of the searches by internet users and AOL which accounts for 3.4 percent of the internet searches.
Googles’ supremacy may be attributed to the different features that the company offers such as expanded searches, mapping and local directories. In addition to Googles achievement is it being number 1 also in the video category which is highly attributed to Google’s acquisition of YouTube. This category is where Yahoo! failed as it went down to the number four spot last March as it was overtaken by another contender in the video category hulu.com.
Truly, Google has made its mark as the number one search engine today but the question still looms, for how long? This doubtful remark is due to the entry of new players in the search engine game like the new computational knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha and the addition of robots or crawlers for Twitter which is leaning towards becoming a real time search engine.
Many experts have forecasted that with the rise of internet as the prime power in the network of social media, the news papers will disappear in another ten years. The internet communicates with everyone who knows its language! With just one click we are exposed to immense ocean of knowledge. The internet has created a virtual community of its own. Numerous social networking media are operating online, bringing together the folks with common interest and curiosity. These media have brought people from different countries, different social and economical status, different views and opinions, under a common platform thus forming a new community, a new society, exchanging knowledge, far above the barriers of caste and racial discrimination and status a very fertile ground to augmenting your Search engine optimisation campaign.
With the growing awareness of these web tools amongst the masses, new social networking web sites are coming up with more advance features and connectivity. These social networking tools give an individual her space to speak, to decide, to share opinion and view point. Altogether, it is the tool to explore the inner self. Viewers can chose upon their friends, exchange knowledge and move ahead without any social pressure. Some social media network has the advance feature of photo sharing. Audience can get them registered and float their memories all across the world without paying a single penny. With link such as Amazon.com, people can share the music they are listening or the book they are reading. One can also share the present mood with the entire community using the pull down menu displaying different moods. The videos and the live chats have given the way of communicating a pulse.
The book stores and the libraries benefit a lot by sharing information through such a social network. The real-time communication system that most of these social networking websites possess has lightened the margin line between real and virtual.
The social networking through blogs and websites brings together the people of common interest or problem. The individuals facing problems in carrier, relationships, health or any other aspect of life can join the particular group and share their issues through blogs and several other interacting features. The comments received by these blogs many a times give an effective solution without disclosing the identity.
These websites have become the easiest and the most economic way of reaching the mass. This feature can be exploited to bring the shake to any business. Many smart trade people put the catalogues of their merchandise in their profile thus easily directing the large customers to their stores. Not only that, the social networking plays a vital role in making or breaking any product’s image. Many individuals use this platform for the social grounds such as spreading the awareness about common issues like global warming, AIDS and many more, and thus help in raising the lending hands to fight back for social interest. Need I say more? Before you actually start considering these websites as part of your SEO strategy?
Website design may be defined as articulating, organising and managing the written content in the codes accepted by the web browser via graphical user interface so as to deliver it to the masses through World Wide Web. In a layman language, the process of making the web site more users friendly is called website design and usability.
The audience traffic visiting any particular website not only depends upon its content but also the way that information is communicated. For example, any web site that has used a back ground colour which is reducing the visibility of its content, or a web site where the navigating buttons are hard to locate, receive less hits and poor response. The ideal website should be uncomplicated, intuitive, responsive and less time consuming. Web site designing is not a rocket science. Here are few tips and techniques if followed will give a desired website as a result.
1. Reduced navigation buttons
The more you will have them on your website, more will you increase the user’s confusion and thus will consume more time. The solutions to this are hiding or concealing the added function buttons. For example, to make the interface more friendly, place one search button. When selected, unhide the search options thus giving the process more clarity. Use attractive eye pleasing colours for the function buttons to make them visible and make your website design aesthetically pleasing.
2. Character font
The content will be read only when it is readable! No visitor will ever use magnifying glass to read your website’s write ups. Always use a medium font size for your matter. Remember, blue is the colour for links.
3. You, the Creator
As the internet is becoming the rising power in the world of mass media, more and more people wants to have a website of their own. Now there is no need to hire a website designer as there are many educational websites existing that gives complete step by step instructions to develop a website of your own. You have all the rights and authority on your project. More over a number of websites also offers thousands of templates of already created websites for you to pick from.
For designing any website for your self or for the client, it is essential to know the motive behind it. Depending upon the client’s need you can include additional functions like sound effects, animations and other forms to make the resulting website more successful.
Time and again Google is being battered by lawsuits regarding it’s implementation of the Adwords policy, a pay-per-click marketing technique which allows a person to bid for keywords and use it as advertisement over the internet. So is Google changing it’s policy to conform and please those who filed lawsuits against them? Well, no quite this is because the change in Google’s policy is not in congruence with that of the subject of the lawsuits filed against the company. The lawsuits’ subject is the fact that a winning keyword bidder can use a competitor keyword to redirect internet users to their site, for example the keyword used is Pepsi but when clicked it will bring the user to Coca Cola’s website, or for some derogatory remarks about the trademark name may be used in the advertisement.
The changes in the policy of Google is about the use of product names, before the change in policy retailers of products cannot use the product name in their pay-per-click ad without the express authorisation of the company producing the product. The process of asking for authorisation is actually an additional burden to the retailers over the web because of the fact that before asking for an authorisation the retailer must first secure a letter template from google adwords division to which the retailer will write his or her request.From there the retailer can now ask the company for authorisation, unfortunately, it takes several weeks and even months for a company to respond to such emails for request of authorisation. This maybe attributed to the fact that it will have to take the company’s whole legal division to process one measly request and it should have the approval of every affected offices in the company, which is if you look closer, a situation that would be time consuming because you are asking for an authorisation to sell the company’s product.
Google, in their new policy is trying to avoid such unreasonable situation, by allowing adwords subscribers or bidders to use trademarked name as long as it is generic in nature, but the main policy change is now allowing retailer to use the product name as long as they can prove that they actually are resellers of such products, proof that may come only from the reseller and not from the main company.
Look at some of our other posts for more information on website design and search engine optimisation.
When HTML 4.01 was introduced the World Wide Web Consortium had announced that some Hypertext Markup Language tags or commonly known as HTML tags are no longer part of the standards of website design or in other words such tags were already considered as deprecated. Along with the “removal” of some selected tags in HTML to be used in website design is the advent of a new scripting language for web design dubbed as Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. The purpose of CSS in website design is to provide avenue for the presentation of a web page, in other words it gives form or body or design to the web page structure that is provided by the Hypertext Markup Language. Therefore, CSS is here to stay and learning it would provide the knowledge that you need in order to create beautiful and professional website designs.
The first aspect of the Cascading Style Sheet that a website designer should understand is the manner on how CSS is utilised. Cascading style sheets provides an inheritance system that will affect your website design process. Inheritance in CSS has the same concept as that of the familial inheritance. This means that that top level characteristics of your website design is transferred to the middle and subsequently to the lower level. To put things into a more understandable manner, we take into consideration the three levels of inheritance in CSS the external, internal and the inline styles. The top level would be the external style, this style is separated from the web page and is given a separate file name with the .css file extension, this external file is linked to the target web page via the use of the link tag. The middle level is the internal style, the code for this type of style is written within the web page but only within the head tag. The internal style coding is started by using the style tag and all CSS scripts within the style tag inside the head tag is considered to be the existing design properties. Finally, the lower level style is the inline style, this type of style is written directly within the target tag and the design or code in the inline style will be the prevailing style for that specific tag overriding any styles that applied by the other two higher level style.
Does it mean that overriding the higher level style would tantamount to the removal of the scripts written in the said levels of style? The answer is of course no, the design is not eliminated but instead only overlapped by the next lower level of style, that is how inheritance works, your website design will inherit the design from the top level and be applied unless specifically overridden by the next level of inheritance.
For example your website design has this following code for the following levels:
External – color:red
Internal – color:blue
Inline – color:green
Assuming that these three codes targets the bold tag then the text within will be colored green, so is blue and red lost? No, you can test this by removing the inline style, here, expect that the texts’ color is now blue and if you also remove the internal style you will notice the text to be colored red. This proves that the color in the website design is inherited and not lost. Now that you have a detailed knowledge on website design using CSS you can now start designing your web page using the power of the Cascading Style Sheets.
