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How Google Search Plus Your World is Changing SEO

In its simplest form, search engine optimization (SEO) used to be about three things - making your content crawlable, linkable, and usable. Gaining greater visibility on search engine results pages was relatively easy. Depending on your business model, it was also much easier said than done.

Nimble smaller businesses routinely outmaneuvered larger enterprises when it came to securing specific query-relevant rankings in the search engines, especially in Google. Ultimately, relevancy had to be redefined by shifting algorithmic weightings toward trust and authority, and away from feigned popularity and repurposed content.

Now, SEO needs to be as conversational as it is contextually relevant, in order to be well represented in Google's most recent algorithmic shifts. True to form, enterprise level SEO initiatives will have to play a game of catch-up this year in order to reap new opportunities from social search results.

Recent Developments

Google’s search results have been influenced by some measure of social signals for years. It’s only now that the social signals can wholly resonate through Google’s Search Plus Your World release earlier this month.

Google Plus Buttons made their debut in June last year. At the time, experts gave it a bit of a “so what” nod as yet another “me too” social experience. Recently Larry Page announced that 90 million users have signed up to Google Plus since launch. Those Plus buttons are growing in importance.

Google Search Plus Your World is the next evolutionary step in determining what is relevant to personalized search queries in that individuals search results are greatly influenced by their circles of friends.

In Google Search Plus Your World, your friends’ online experiences are more relevant to your personal search results than links and domain authority. This is a game changer from what we all knew and understood about perceived relevancy of public web search results. When you’re signed in to Google all you need do is toggle between the two very different, yet seemingly relevant, search results.

Presumably if you find that your personalized search results in Google Search Plus Your World lack relevancy, you be well advised to start finding some new friends. Not to worry. Google’s been thinking about that too.

Last week Google rolled out yet another new feature for Google Plus that lets searchers start a conversation directly from search results, and contribute to the relevant conversation by way of the Google Plus stream.

It’s not only easier to find people, personalities and pages in Google Plus personalized search results, you can readily expand your circle of influence by adding these people to your circle of friends – and vice versa. All you need do is find the “share box” in your search results and you'll be presented with an opportunity to "join the discussion" about whatever you've searched for.

In Google Search Plus Your World, there is no search without social. Your search queries resonate social signals through personalized search.

Better be careful for what you search for. Oh, snap! That’s right. No one will know what search phrase you used, except you and Google, because your Search Plus Your World results are hidden behind https:// and no keywords will be linked to your search in any analytics programs.

Points to Ponder

While Google Search Plus Your World evolves into a centralized social hub of activity that connects search results with social functions, we must be cognizant of the fact that the search engine will likely be testing algorithms that introduce weighted social search signals into Google's public web search results.

Google search has historically been about finding the best results for the many. Google Search Plus Your World is about finding the best results for you. Now, “you” are the enterprise. That is to say, each individual that uses Google Plus represents a new opportunity to have digital content produced by or about your enterprise discovered and shared among immeasurable circles of friends.

SEO in 2012, be it public or personal, is all about providing content that is worthy of being shared, by links or by circles. Now that the context of the search query is the conversation, relevancy is truly in the eye of the beholder … as long as the people or the publication is beholden to Google+.

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How Google's latest algorithm changes affect your website ?

Google improves ranking algorithm on an ongoing basis. During the previous weeks, Google changed three things on the result pages that are visible to all Google users.

The changes are an easier for searchers but they might be bad for your site.

1. Google has increased the snippet length. Less visitors for you ?

Google now shows an extended snippet for queries that consist of three or more keywords. The idea behind this change is that these multi-word queries are very targeted and complex. The usual short snippet might not contain enough information.

What does this change mean for your website ?

The longer snippet contains much more information. As Google tries to provide the user with the most relevant information in the snippet, the snippet might already contain the answer to the user's query. The longer snippets might result in the following:
• Fewer users might click through to your website because they get the answer to their question in the search results.
• Users might begin to use more multiple-word queries to get more detailed search result snippets.
• As the longer snippets need more space, the longer snippets move another result page below the fold and web surfers will see fewer results at first glance. That increases the importance of very high rankings.
It seems that Google ignores the meta description tag for the snippets. That means that you must include a call to action in your web page titles.

2. Google now shows more related searches at the bottom of the results

When you search for a keyword, Google will display related searches at the bottom and sometimes at the top of the search results.
For example, if you search for the keyword " sports cars", Google will suggest " bmw," " ferrari," " classic cars " and " sports cars 2007" as related terms that could help you find what you need.

What does this change mean for your website ?

It's important that you optimize the different pages of your website for different keywords. Do not concentrate on a single keyword but cover a wide range of keywords so that Google will classify your website as relevant to the complete topic.
The more related keywords and pages can be found on your website, the better.

3. Google now shows local results based on IP addresses

Search Google for the keyword " web design kolkata" and you'll see local results in the middle of the search results. These local results are delivered based on the IP address of the searcher. That means that you will get different results than people in another city.

What does this change mean for your website ?

It's now easier to rank for competitive keywords for some local searches. While it's very difficult to get a high ranking for a very competitive keyword such as "lawyer" in the regular results, it's much easier to be listed for that keyword in the local results if you're living in a small town.
You should submit your website to Google Maps so that web surfers can find you in these local searches. You can submit your website to Google Maps with IBP's semi-automatic directory submitter.
If you run a local business, you should include your business name, your category and the name of your city in the title tag of your homepage.
If you want to get on top of Google's search results then your website must have optimized content and good inbound links. If you give Google what it wants then your website will get the best possible rankings.

Google Opens Up Its Universal Analytics Beta To All Google Analytics Users

Nowadays, people use a number of platforms to surf the web, and this variation in platform use make it a challenge for businesses and website owners to keep track of their site’s performance and interact with consumers. In an effort to make things more manageable, Google recently opened up its Universal Analytics to all Google Analytics Users.

Simply put, the public beta of Universal Analytics aims to help website owners better track their website performance across multiple platforms. This is believed to be more accurate than the original Google Analytics since it covers different channels that consumers use to access the Internet when they search for information, products and services, utilize social media, and interact with other users.

What Makes Universal Analytics Distinct from Google Analytics

According to Google, Universal Analytics make use of a data collection method that is

A good Google Places listing can help you get easy traffic to your site. If you are wondering why optimizing your Google+ Places is important, then the answer is simple. Approximately a third of every search is based on location and Google Places makes it very easy to obtain a page one listing.

For example if you are a Real Estate Display Home with multiple sales offices or a retail boutique with multiple outlets, Google Places is an excellent channel to use.

Here is a look at 5 tips to effectively optimize your Google+ places listing.

1. Contact Details on Your Site

The first tip for an effectual Google places optimization is making sure that you have a

Google+ is actually one of quite a few of Google’s attempts to break into the social media circuit. After a few failed attempts, they have finally found a winner. It stands no chance of competing with Facebook (at least not in the foreseeable future), but is still popular enough to enable you to grab a few SEO benefits from it. It is possible to use Google+ to help you get a little bit higher in the search engine results pages.

Google will follow some of your profile links

If you add a bunch of links onto your Google+ pages then Google may pay them a passing interest, but if you can connect a link to your Google+ profile, then the more popular your profile becomes then the more attention Google will pay to your connected

Top 10 Essential SEO Ranking Factors to Dominate Search

Google hаѕ mоrе thаn 200 rаnkіng factors. Wе continue tо ѕее thіѕ ѕtаtеmеnt іn соuntlеѕѕ роѕtѕ, debates, mееtіng рlасеѕ, conferences, еtс. Wе hаvе аll bееn wеll асquаіntеd wіth thіѕ іdеа fоr mаnу уеаrѕ, but thе іrоnу іѕ thаt mоѕt оf thе fасtоrѕ hаvе nоt уеt bееn соnfіrmеd bу Google. Google hаѕ stated ѕоmе оf thеm tо educate wеbmаѕtеrѕ аbоut thе іmроrtаnсе оf ѕuсh factors.

But mоѕt оf thе оthеr factors wе ѕее оn hіgh-quаlіtу ѕіtеѕ аrе pure speculation оr thе bеѕt assumptions аnd mоѕt оf thе tіmе уоu wіll bе іn thе mіddlе оf a correlation-causality wаr. Sо wе wіll nоt tаlk аbоut thеѕе issues hеrе, оn thе соntrаrу, I wоuld bе interested іn fосuѕіng оn ѕоmе tорісѕ thаt hаvе

What problem with Duplicate Content ?

Duplicate content – This is very effective to loose Search Engine Rankings:
Using duplicate content is very harmful for search engine ranking. Most webmasters are using duplicate content today. Some of them thinking duplicating the content is time save, but the fact is that duplicate content can loss search engine rankings of your web page. The big problem for duplicating content is that, your web page won’t be indexed by the search engines no matter what SEO strategy you are doing for your page.

Google’s point of view about Duplicate content :
About Google point of view, duplicate content can be two types:
1. Duplicate content within your website – When same content appears in more than one page of your own website.
2. Duplicate content in others website – When one content of your site which appears in other external sites.
In case of first category (Duplicate content within your website) it’s totally on your hands to remove duplicate content to get crawled by Google. One of the best way provided by Google to avoid the first problem is use of the sitemap file. You should include the preferred version of the URL in the sitemap so that Google can index the particular page of your preference.

In case of second category (Duplicate content in others website), i.e. If any one steals your content and publish it in his website, you will have to monetize it. So that, when Google comes across such content across different web pages, the Google crawler will search for various thing and effectively identify the actual original webpage. According to Google don’t worry about your content duplicated by others because Google crawler can effectively identify them and avoid those pages from indexing.

As said in official Google Webmaster blog, “in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site's presence in the Google index. It simply gets filtered out.”

Five Things You Need To Know About The Google Webspam Team

1. They won’t penalize you over one tiny thing

With all the technical expertise that goes into creating and maintaining it, it’s tempting to view Google as an unfeeling, unthinking robot – one that responds to certain stimuli in certain ways and can’t be bargained with. In reality, Google is built and used by humans – just like the rest of the internet.

For that reason, the Google Webspam team aren’t going to penalize your site just because one well-meaning webmaster created a site-wide link to your domain without realizing that’s not best practice in the world of search engine optimization.

If you’re taking a responsible approach to link building and SEO you don’t need to worry about attracting a less than ideal link here and there. The Webspam team are here to save us from spam, not make the web a flawless place.

So stop fretting over the occasional bad link and instead channel your efforts into getting

SEO Tactics For The Post-Penguin/Panda Internet

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a field of internet marketing that’s constantly in a state of flux thanks to Google’s massive influence over the entire Internet. On more than one occasion, Google has rolled out algorithm updates that punish SEO practices that were once widely accepted. In the aftermath, webmasters are left with seriously reduced page rankings, web traffic and revenues.

Google Penguin

That’s exactly what happened last spring when Google rolled out their notorious Penguin update. From Google’s perspective, Penguin addressed a major problem caused by websites who linked to dozens, even hundreds, of other sites in hope of raising their rankings on search results. This created major headaches for end users, who wound up having to sort through dozens of low quality results in order to find something of value.

For webmasters, Penguin created headaches of a different sort. They suddenly found that

Top 10 On-Page SEO Tips

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important ingredients for getting large amounts of traffic to your website besides high-quality content. Because once your articles are a few weeks old, the majority of the traffic to those articles will come from search engines. That's why it's important to rank high in search engines.

In this article I'm going to describe the 10 basic SEO tips that you should keep in mind when writing a new article or developing a new website to make sure your blog ranks high in the search engines.

1. Place Your Keywords In the Title Tag

The title tag is one of the most important things for ranking high for particular keywords. That's why it's very important to think of a title that contains important keywords and grabs the attention of people. Because when people search on search engines like Google, the title of your page will be displayed in the results and people will click on links that are the most attractive to them first. Remember that it's also very important and rewarding to have a unique title, so before you use the title, Google it and see if the title already appears in the top 10 results.

Please keep in mind that Google only displays the first 70 characters(about 8 words) of your page's title. Google does not even index the keywords in your page's title after the 12th or so word. Yahoo and MSN don't even index pages that have a page title that's too long. Source: Google – How Many Words In A Page Title Tag?

Note: WordPress users should use the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives you the ability to easily place the title of your post in the beginning of your title tag.

2. Optimize Your Robots.txt

Having an optimized robots.txt is important because this file can control which pages of your websites get crawled by the search engine spiders. For those of you who use WordPress, I recommend preventing search engine spiders from crawling wp-admin and plugin folders.

Here are some more resources about the robots.txt file:

3. Proper Use of ALT Tags

The tag should be used to describe an image, not to spammed with keywords that have nothing to do with the image.
Why? Because while it's true that search engine spiders cannot read images, they can however read tags, and having it spammed with keywords that are totally irrelevant to the image will make Google aware of what to derank you for.

Here's some more information about alt tags:

4. Anchor Text of Links

The anchor text is the text inside your tags that links to other pages. Wether they're incoming or outgoing links, it's important for the anchor text to contain a description of where the link is taking the visitor. This is even more important for search engines because it tells its crawlers where the link is going.

So avoid using words like "Click Here" as an anchor text as it can hurt both your website and the website you're linking to. One more thing to keep in mind is to keep the characters in your anchor text under 55.

5. Quality of Inbound and Outbound Links

While most web developers know that having many web sites link to your can boost your rankings, a lot of them don't know that the quality of the websites linking to your websites plays a vital role in your website's page rank. Getting links for random dofollow blogs has a way smaller impact than if a website with a high pagerank links to your website in an article.

Who you link to matters, as Google warned webmasters that they can be penalized if they link to spam websites. Linking to really bad websites (malware injecting websites etc.) can easily get your site removed from Google's search engine results pages(SERPs). One thing to keep in mind is that Google's spiders might not follow all of your links if you have over 100 unique outbound links on a single page.

More articles about linking:

6. Proper Use of Header Tags

,

tags etc. should be used when appropriate. Don't be using

tags as a paragraph or using
class="title"
to display the title of your page or something.

Here's a few things to keep in mind when using header tags:

only use one
tag per page

you can use as many
-
tags as you like in your pages

search engine crawlers only read basic html(no css what-so-ever)

More articles about header tags:

How To Use Tags – Proper Use Of H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 Elements

How to optimize keywords in header tags.

7. Importance of the First Paragraph

Your first paragraph is the most important paragraph in your page. This is because it's the first paragraph search engines scan and they assume that it's somewhat of a summary of the page/article. That's why it's essential to have the most important keywords of your page in the first sentence or two.

If you're using the All in One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress, the plugin will automatically take the content from your first paragraph and place it in the meta description, which is the text that search engines display under the title of your page.

8. Ensure Your Site is Accessible

An accessible website should ensure that its content can be successfully delivered as often as possible. The functionality of pages, the uptime of the server, validity of HTML elements are all parts of site accessibility. If these points are either ignored or faulty, both your visitors and search engines will select other websites to visit.

Use tools like:

To know if your site contains broken links or when your site is down.

9. Use SEO Friendly URLs

The URL of a page should be descriptive so both the users and search engines have an idea what the page they're being linked to consists of. SEO Friendly URLs also have the benefit of serving as their own anchor text when copy pasted to forums etc. due to URL having the keywords of the page in its URL. These type of URLs usually rank higher in search engines than pages with a URL like example.com/p=981489894.

Furthermore, when using Dynamic URLs try to keep your dynamic parameters under 2 or else the chance is high than it might not get crawled by search engine spiders unless they're perceived as very important(ie. have a large amount of inbound links).

More articles about SEO Friendly URLs:

10. Site Usability

If your website is cluttered with ads and has a terrible layout, accessibility, navigation and low quality of content, chances are that you'll get less people linking back to your site than one that has better usability than yours, thus resulting in lower page ranking.
If your website was designed in the 90s you seriously need consider hiring a web designer to redesign your website.

Google Analytics Plugin For WordPress – Review

Having a website and seeing it grow in size and stature can be very reassuring for webmasters. In reality however that seldom happens; it is usually struggle and hard work most of the time. Often webmasters in spite of their concerted efforts fail in getting enough visitors to their site. The main reason why that happens is because enough information is not available to webmasters to determine their weakness. It can be with the content, a niche not widely patronized or plain ignorance of the webmaster.

The first step toward building a website with potential to bring in large traffic is, understanding statistics and comparing your site’s performance with those of others. But where do you get the statistics and other information about your site to begin with? Chances are that you are not aware of the various tools available in the internet for getting information. However, don’t despair, there is help and it is the form of Google Analytics. Google Analytics is in reality a piece of software that collects data about your site’s performance in the internet.

While Google Analytics is a generic piece of software, programmers across the world have developed plugins that can be put in the website to collect data, which can at a latter point of time be used for making analysis. For those who are not tech savvy, software writers have come up with special programs that can be used with their website for mining data. One of the more fortunate sites to have ready made plugins for data analysis is WordPress.

Here is what Google Analytics Plugins for WordPress can do. There are scores of plugins available in the internet; some free while others need to be paid for using them. However, in principle they have the same role to play – provide real time information pertaining to your users demography, number of visitors the website gets, how long a visitor spends in each page and more.

Another use for the Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress is they help you get sponsors and advertisement, especially if you are actively into PPC and CPA programs. The statistics you collect through the plugin can help provide your prospective advertisers the information they need to make an evaluation about your site’s performance and then decide on the course of action.

Selecting the right plugin is however not an easy task. For most part the right one is something that you alone can decide. It all depends on what kind of information you may want. However, there is information which is common to all Google Analytics Plugins.

- Asynchronous Analytic Tracking: Which means that a code within your webpage will keep track and help your website load faster and give you more accurate data.

- Event Tracking: Another special feature of Google Analytics; it helps track problem pages which you can then target for special attention and make changes.

Custom Variables: They help you track your visitor’s preference and gather Meta data. You can use this information to change the codes in your webpage for optimizing them to be search friendly.

Interesting Tips about Google Analytics

SEO and Google Analytics reach hand in hand – there is no doubt one of the best tools out there for really understanding how your website is performing in terms of search and inbound links. By Google Analytics you can see how SEO techniques affect your web site in about as close to real time as you can get. In this topic I want to walk you through a some of the interesting tricks and caveats I have discovered when using some of the more advanced Analytics features.
At first discuss about segmenting. If you have experience in SEO long time you know that there are times when you want to segment out visitors or pages from your site to take a closer look at what is driving the content, or where they are coming from. For example, many web sites put their sales process into a separate segmentation so they can analyze how people make purchase decisions more closely. It’s not strange to see another page depths broken into segments to see how far down people will drill into content. The general concept is the farther down people drill in content, the more “hooked” they are on the content and the site.

When applying these segments to keywords in Google Analytics you will often see keywords that show “0” visits, which is misleading. Google is actually start the counter at 0 for the first visitor. Tonight is because of Google’s effort to make sure the total number of visitors reconcile with other Analytics data. This is only occurs when the same user comes to your site within a 30 minute time frame using different search terms. So, for example, if a user searches for “SEO optimization” and visit your site through search and then goes back to their search engine and types in “Apple pie” and visits your site again, the keywords will show 0 visits even though you have had one visit for “Apple pie”.

It’s confusing, but worth noting so you don’t scar do-it-yourself head wondering why Google is showing 0 visits for a particular keyword.

The next titbit is for those of you who have your Adwords account tied into your Analytics account. In this case you will see keywords that have displayed text ads on Google, but haven’t had any click-through, show up as 0 clicks in the keyword report. Different mind scratcher for some until you realize that Analytics is simply pulling through impression and click-through data from Adwords.

Analytics is a mighty tool, and I’d enjoy to hear from you the tricks, caveats and pitfalls you’ve discovered when using it for SEO and keeping track of search and click campaigns.

Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages

With all Facebook pages only Facebook Insights program is available to page administrators. Facebook Insights shows demographic details and interactions on your pages BUT limited to show information of fans only. It is far less sophisticated and comprehensive when compared to the free Google Analytics. One of the limitations of Facebook Fan pages is that you can only run limited Javascript on it and Google Analytics needs Javascript code included to correctly track visitors. We have successfully managed to get ALL functions of Google Analytics working on our Facebook fan page (including visitor statistics, traffic sources, visitor country, keyword searches with all other powerful reporting & maps overlays etc).

How to setup Google Analytics on your Facebook fan pages

The workaround we use in our code is to include Google Analytics as an image instead of setting the standard Javascript. This method tracks every visitor to the custom facebook pages on Google Analytics. It required a combination of server side cookie management and an additional tag to the bottom of the facebook fan page. Here are the steps to get Google Analytics working on your facebook fan page.

1) Setup Google Analytics account. If you already have one, create a new website profile. You can name it facebook.com or facebook.com/your_page_name. You will finally get your tracking code which looks like this UA-3123123-2

2) Create your custom img tag for each of your pages you like to track. EG: contact form, services, products etc.

Google is Finally Removed PageRank

Google has dropped PageRank data from its webmaster tools due to statistical imbalance.

Google uses PageRank algorithm to calculate a web page’s rank in a numerical score based on the importance it gets. Its rank is loosely dependent on the inbound links to a page apart from the relevance and credibility of these links.

Until now, PageRank has been one of the many variables included in Google's Webmaster Tools, but according to Google analyst Susan Moskwa:
"We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much... We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

Now a days Google is only updating the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year.

It certainly wont stop certain webmasters using the tool to obtain high quality links to enhance their sites ranking. Hopefully this may reduce the amount of people trying to manipulate the search results by selling links on high PR pages. This move by Google is a statement to Webmasters that PR is not as important as everyone thinks, lets hope it changes some peoples minds.

Difference between 301 and 302 Redirects

Many people don't know the different between a 301 and 302 redirect. You might think that Google and the other search engines would just follow the redirects, but that's where things get complicated. A 301 redirect means that the page has moved to a new location, permanently. A 302 redirect means, that the move is temporary. Search engines need to figure out whether to keep the old page, or replace it with the one found at the new location. Use the wrong type of redirects, and the search engines' view of your web site can get screwed up, badly.

Why does this matter? If you are moving a web page or an entire web site to a new location, for instance if you change your domain name, you want visitors to be able to find your site. A redirect causes the user's browser to automatically forward from the old location to the new one. You might think that Google and the other search engines would just follow the redirects, but that's where things get complicated. When a site moves, that can trigger the Google aging delay. Usually the site drops out of the search rankings for several months, sometimes even a year. We'll come back to this later.

There aren't too many situations where a 302 is appropriate. How often have you temporarily moved a page? It's much more common to move pages permanently. Nevertheless, it seems easier to create 302 redirects than 301s. You can use Javascript or a meta tag to create a 302. Creating a 301 redirect requires special commands in your .htaccess file if you use an Apache server. With Windows servers, creating 301 takes even more time and trouble. That's why there's a tendency for people to mistakenly use 302 instead of 301.

Google recognizes that many people use 302 when they really mean 301. Fortunately, Google isn't bound by any law to take people literally. For the sake of producing the best possible search results, Google can and should look at 302s and figure out if the webmaster really means 302, or if it's run-of-the-mill confusion and they really mean 301.

Whether Google actually handles 302s properly is an open question. If you use a 302 when you should be using a 301, there's a chance Google or some other search engines might keep your old URL in the index, and then filter out your new URL as a duplicate. You might end up with link popularity divided between the two domains, hurting your search rankings. The search engines might figure out how to handle your 302, or they might not.

Google Planned to Shut Down Buzz Service

Google announced that Google Buzz and several other products shut down by January 15, 2012.

The list of Products Slated for Closure

Google is continuing its trend of narrowing focus with the announcement of a "fall sweep." In this case, what's being swept away is a number of products that haven't been popular enough for Google to warrant continued support and development. As mentioned above, those products include:

Google Buzz. This is certainly the most noteworthy shutdown, although far from the least predictable. Buzz was introduced in February of 2010 and garnered lots of early attention, but failed to gain traction or long-term support. Buzz will be shut down in the next "few weeks."
Code Search. This niche search tracked down open source code, but both it and its API will be closed for business on January 15th, 2012.
University Research Program for Google Search. This program gave academic researchers API access to search results, but will discontinue on January 15th, 2012.
iGoogle social features. While iGoogle will continue as normal, all features that gave social capabilities will be closed in favor of Google+ on January 15th, 2012.
Jaiku. This social updating feature acquired by Google in 2007 will be shut down on January 15th, 2012. More>>

The Way of Optimize Your Images for Search Engines

This is post is about the way of optimize images for search engines using Google Image Search.

What is Google Image Search? It is a search service made by Google to allow users to use images to search the web for any topic of interest. i.e. events, movies, etc.

Images are not just something that will make your site visually attractive and more appealing to your readers. It is also a way to drive more traffic to a site.

Nowadays, optimizing images is becoming more and more important in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). A lot of people use Google image search to find images for a variety of topics. In Google's webmasters guidelines, they encourage webmasters to use alternative text for the images. The reason behind this is that search engines can't see images.

Also, highly relevant images show at the top of Google's search result page when it matches the search query that can bring more search engine traffic to a site. See the picture below.

How To Optimize Your Images For Search Engines

* Use keyword in your Alt text.

Alt stands for alternative text. This is the most important thing in image optimization. You should include a keyword or phrase that is relevant to the image, but take note that you should not stuff it with keywords that many inexperienced webmasters do and unethical SEO's do to avoid penalties fromSearch Engines. To make it more clear, here's how it looks:

(img src="imagename.jpg" alt="descriptive text here")

* Use relevant text around your images.

Make sure that there is a descriptive text with your keywords relevant to the image and placed it before or after the image.

* Name your images.

Instead of going with the original file names that looks like this one g521.jpg, name your images. Let's say you have a picture of Chuck Lidell. You could use chuck-lidell.jpg for that pic. You can use hyphens in the file name, but avoid using three hyphens. Also avoid using underscores as well.

* Use anchor text keywords in image links.

Use a keyword when linking to a specific image instead of using Click to view Full Size. You can use something like Chuck Lidell Training.

* Make your image folder accessible to SE.

* Re-upload your images to keep them fresh.

* Use .jpg as the image formatting.

* Use Social Site Tag for your images.

If your images has little or no textual content, it would be more helpful to tag it using social tags like Technorati. It adds more weight to your image to help it rank better.

* Use reliable photo sharing hosting like Flickr and tag your images.

It is said that it helps yahoo image optimization.

These are just some ways on how to optimize your images for Search Engines. Take advantage of these tips to help your site's ranking on the SERP and drive more traffic to your site.

How to Promote Your Blog in Social Medias

You should use social media to increase the reputation and readership of your blog. If you are trying to increase its PageRank using social media, you will make the acquaintance of failure. The Google programmers are never going to put too much faith into social media because it is too easy to manipulate.

A person may start 100 new accounts today, and use them every day, then once a week they may comment on and link to a website. If Google were paying attention, the websites in question would rise high in the Google search engine results. Manipulating social media for search engine results improvement is too easy and hence unimportant unless Google decide to take note of social media mentions/likes.

Your job is to raise the reputation and prestige of your website through social media, so that people will wish to link to you of their own free will. So that people will comment positively on your blog and will follow it of his or her own free will.

Do not forget to put the little social media widgets/buttons on your blog somewhere, so that you blog readers may also follow your social media actions. It is not necessary but is a good idea if you run competitions, surveys or offers on your social media site.

Facebook

If you have a business page feed, you should enable the auto-share function. It will share

10 Google Algorithm Changes That Affect Your Ranking

Matt Cutts written Google makes about 500 changes to its search algorithm every year. This summer Google published a video that gives a glimpse into their overall process, and on 14th Nov they shared a flavor of specific algorithm changes by publishing a highlight list of many of the improvements made over the past couple weeks. List of ten improvements from the past couple weeks by Google:

Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where limited web content is available (Afrikaans, Malay, Slovak, Swahili, Hindi, Norwegian, Serbian, Catalan, Maltese, Macedonian, Albanian, Slovenian, Welsh, Icelandic), we will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results. This feature was available previously in Korean, but only at the bottom of the page. Clicking on the translated titles will take you to pages translated from English into the query language.
Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: This change helps us choose more relevant text to use in snippets. As we improve our understanding of web page structure, we are now more likely to pick text from the actual page content, and less likely to use text that is part of a header or menu.
Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: We look at a number of signals when generating a page’s title. One signal is the anchor text in links pointing to the page. We found that boilerplate links with duplicated anchor text are not as relevant, so we are putting less emphasis on these. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This improvement reduces the number of long, sometimes arbitrary query predictions in Russian. We will not make predictions that are very long in comparison either to the partial query or to the other predictions for that partial query. This is already our practice in English.
Extending application rich snippets: We recently announced rich snippets for applications. This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results. This change extends the coverage of application rich snippets, so they will be available more often.
Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
Fresher, more recent results: As we announced just over a week ago, we’ve made a significant improvement to how we rank fresh content. This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches (around 6-10% of search results to a noticeable degree) and better determines the appropriate level of freshness for a given query.
Refining official page detection: We try hard to give our users the most relevant and authoritative results. With this change, we adjusted how we attempt to determine which pages are official. This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
Improvements to date-restricted queries: We changed how we handle result freshness for queries where a user has chosen a specific date range. This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
Prediction fix for IME queries: This change improves how Autocomplete handles IME queries (queries which contain non-Latin characters). Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

Google Docs Added Folder Sharing Feature

Google added couple of new features to its Google Docs, namely folder sharing and multiple file uploads.

Now you can share your files means spreadsheets, presentations and document files with other people also you can now share folders in Google Docs means that the service is more useful for groups who can now work on all the documents in a folder together.

And the addition of multiple file uploads means that you can upload more files at once,which previously allowed one. This feature saving both time and effort and making life so much easier.