Is Bounce Rate A Ranking Factor For Google

Higher bounce rate is usually a sign of a lower quality web page also it effects overall website rankings. This also means that your web page either doesn't offer what the visitors are searching for or the usability of your web page isn't good.

To lower the bounce rate of your web pages
You can improve the bounce rate of your website by improving the content of your website making it more keyword rich and the usability of your web pages. Lowering the bounce rate of your web pages has two major effects for your website it's likely that you will get more visitors and traffic from search engines and your conversion rate will increase.

Bounce rate alone might not be used by Google as a ranking factor but combined with other factors, it could have an effect on the rankings.

Why Google Rankings Drop

There are several reasons that can cause a ranking drop on major search engines, some of them are listed below.

• Whenever you change your web pages or do any major updations on your website, Google temporarily downranks web pages.You don't need to worry about the ranking drop as you'll get your old rankings back after some time.
• As your competition keeps on growing so might be other web pages are better than yours. In that case, optimize your web page for more targted keywords and try to get more better inbound links.
• Google might think that you are using spam elements on your webpages you can find out if your website has been penalized or not. Search for your domain name on Google, if Google
  cannot find any page of your website if you search for "site:yourdomain.com" then it's nearly sure that your website has been penalized.

Google Webmaster Question Answer Chat Parade

Very interesting Google webmaster Question Answer chat Parade.You can read the interesting facts at the link below

http://www.pagetrafficblog.com/google-webmaster-chat-questions-answers/5475/

How Your Web Page Titles Can Help You With Local Search

If your website sells something for related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by the right people. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in business targeted area is to optimize your web page titles.

What is the web page title?
The title of a web page is the text that is written between the title tags in the HTML code of a web page. The web page title is displayed in the web browser window and it is usually used as the linked text heading on the top when your website appears in the search results.

Importance of having optimized web page titles.
Title is the major factor that search engines use to rank web pages. A good web page title greatly improves the chances of getting high search engine rankings.


Change your web page title so that it gets better local rankings.
By changing your webpage title you'll benefit from targeted traffic and you'll get more sales than before. Here are some things that you can do to improve your web page titles:

• Include the name of your business, important keywords and your city in the title of your homepage:E.g. High Heels - The shoe shop for inexpensive footwear in London
  

• Depending on your business size and type, change the order of Meta keywords. Big brand businesses should list their company name first. If your business is new then it's usually better to list the keyword first: E.g. The shoe shop for inexpensive footwear: High Heels in London
  

• Use a different title tag for every page. This is important. The title should reflect the content that can be found on the page. For branding purposes, the titles should contain your company name and a popular keyword for which you want to be found on search engines: E.g. High Heels: Buy inexpensive sneakers in London
  

• Do not use special characters in your titles. Avoid symbols and other special characters. They might not be displayed properly on all computers and your website might look strange in the search results.

If you update your web page titles as discussed, your website will get better rankings on search engines and it will be found by people who live in the right targeted area where you want your business to grow.

Social Bookmarking Software Has Knocked The Online Market

Social bookmarking software is a fortunate thing for busy webmasters as more number of social bookmark sites has emerged in the last few years and have added a new element to online interactive communities.

Social bookmarking software has knocked the market. Many like minded people share articles, tips and general advice through the massive social networking sites e.g. Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, etc, etc that offer visitors the power to tag keywords based on the relevant content/write-ups.

Social bookmarking is the easiest way for online surfers to share information with other like minded people. Social bookmarking software helps to effectively regulate the reviews/views and this can have a powerful viral effect. Social bookmarking software is essential for the online web surfers as just one good informative article can be shared and tagged with a relevant anchor text link keyword phrase across many networks and will often find a top 10 position at search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN as users tag the keyword phrase.

Google SERP Showing Author Name.

When searched for some PDF File on Google.com i came across something very intresting in that. In one of the PDF file its author name was written next to it. Below is the snapshot.

On-Page SEO and Great Content Goes Hand-in-Hand

The Web is constantly growing and, as it grows, the competition will become tougher. The only way to survive online and to get noticed is to have something fundamentally good. Whether on-page SEO or great online content you should never choose between the two, they should go hand in hand. Great content has another advantage, it will help build your authority online and help you obtain great traffic, visits and incoming links.

How should you building great content online it’s very simple to perform. Just think in terms of your audience and try to give them value for time. Once you've built your content, just see if you can perform SEO on that content. Like if you can change few words here and there to optimize the use of some keywords.

New Project Knol Live Now

The most awaited new project Knol (authoritative articles) where people can share their knowledge is open to everyone now. You can share your knowledge over the web with your name reveal on the side of article. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content

Website Traffic Drop : Due To The Quality Of Links

Google SERP changes isn't the only reason for a huge drop in website traffic in the month of July. JohnMu of Google over the Google Group has stated that, the site traffic drop can also occur due to the quality of links, that aren't upto the expectations of Google.

Matt Cutts Speaks About Search Engines

Matt Cutts, speaks about Webmaster Central and challenges for search engines in the future.

Optimizing PDF Documents For Search Engines

PDF documents can also be optimized for Search engines here are some simple tips for optimizing PDFs:

1. Use the meta-data feature found in adobe professional, with document title, description and keywords. This will help to generate the Meta-tags for your PDF documents, making it SEO friendly.
   
2. Name the PDF document with your targeted keywords. Put your high volume keywords in File names of the PDF document. PDF document gives SEOs one more chance at ranking for targeted keywords

Use Of Static URLs Over Dynamic Ones

As per SEO perspective its good practice to have Static URL's then Dynamic URL's as search engine crawlers have the ability to index and rank the static URL's more. Also a cleaner, easier to understand output is created. As you start to add more than one parameter to a URL search engine crawler have a dificult time indexing the URL. So the URL's which are not in the index will never rank or drive traffic from search engines.


Having keywords in URL structure is beneficial.
Having the keyword in your URL helps search engines understand what your page is about and also helps users know what they are likely to find on the page. See two examples below

abc.com/123467/9876/
abc.com/cars/toyota/


Having Delimiters in URL structure
Delimiters are used in URLs to separate words.The best practice is to use a hyphen to separate words. Search engines do have the ability to understand other characters, such as an underscore, but the hyphen is preferred over an underscore for usability issues.

Three Process Involved In Delivering Search Results

When you search for query on Google, you might wonder from where Google provides these result pages.How does Google find web pages matching your query. Its very simple to understand this, think of Web as a very large book and with a huge index telling you what is placed where and about everything and then its served to you. Basically three process are performed in delivering search results

• Crawling
• Indexing
• Serving

1. Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.This process is performed by automated computer programs called crawlers/spider/robot/bot
2. Indexing is the process where the Crawler/spiders compile a huge index of all the crawled pages or words.
3. Serving is something When a user enters a query, auotmated programs search the index for matching pages and return the results that are most relevant to the user query.

Its very important for each webmaster to get the wesite crawled and indexed by Google to get a higher rank in search results pages.

Check Your Website If Penalized From Google

Your website might get penalized or banned by the Google if you have done some spamming earlier on your website. Later when you have corrected that spamming on your website then also you might see that your website is still not there in the search index. How to check that is very simple, search for "site:yoursite.com" on Google. If Google returns one or more pages from your website then your website has not been fully banned.

To solve that problem just find out what you have done wrong on your website. Google doesn't like spamming, cloaking, link building and similar shady tactics. Re-do your website and ask for reconsideration.

Focus For On-page SEO

It’s very important from seo perspective to have your Meta-tags in proper order and patterns, as for crawler’s meta-tags are very important to catch online business. On-page SEO factors deal with the elements that are on the actual web page in the code. In SEO title tag is the strongest on-page SEO factor, so it's important to pay attention to it.

• Make your title tag that is short and eye-catching, with keyword combinations if possible.
• Title tag should still reads cleanly; do not have an unintelligible keyword-stuffed title, as this will display in the search engine listing for your website.
• If you are a well-recognized brand, such as Nike, you can place your name at the beginning of the page title. This lets you build on the trust in your brand.
• Less well-known companies should place their names near the end of the title, so that a browser's focus goes to the keywords in your title.

Organize Your Website Into Clear Sections

When structuring a website you should go for clear, easy-to-navigate and search engine friendly website architecture. This is good SEO practice for both search engine crawlers and visitors point of view. To do this you must organize your website into clear sections, so that in future also you can expand your website by dividing your website into manageable sections.

Here's a basic example of good site architecture:
1. example.com/cars/

2. example.com/cars/sports-cars/

3. example.com/cars/sports-cars/ferrari/

There are many advantages to have good website architecture.

Easy to navigate: The intermediate and advanced user can easily navigate through the website structure which makes it very simple to understand the website.

Easy to maintain: when website is divided up into manageable sections it is easier to maintain than a site with an unorganized structure.

Well Defined Hierarchy: Pages with more generalized information are at the top of the hierarchy. As you navigate deeper into the site, pages present more specialized information.

What Optimal Keyword Density Should Be Used

Once you are done with your top keyword phrases and search terms what do you do next? It’s the implementation of your service specific and targeted keywords in the content, Meta-tags and other tags of the website to achieve a proper keyword density on the website for the targeted keywords. This will help to boost your search engine rankings also. The best possible keyword density range for strong search engine rankings is 5% – 15%. Below is a measure of the keyword density to what extend it will boost your website rank and to what level it hampers your website ranking.

Keyword Density Of 5% - 15%

If you have a density between 5 – 15% for relevant keywords phrases, then you’re at the optimal level for strong search engine rankings. Now you need to work on other elements of your search engine optimization to get top rankings for these search terms.

Keyword Density Greater Then 15%

If you have any terms that exceed 15%, you run the risk of being penalized by the search engines. Review your web page content and either add additional relevant text or reduce the usage of the keywords to reduce their density on your web page.

Keyword Density Less Then 5%

If you have a density below 5% on relevant keyword phrases, you need to enhance your content and increase the usage of such keywords across your page. The best way is to incorporate the terms into reader friendly content.

Google Labs Offers Suggest Tool

Use Google Suggest tool at Google labs to know more about top search keywords for certain search term. See the snapshot below


Visit Google Suggest at http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Get Your Website Crawled Soon By Search Engine Spiders

Once you are done with SEO on your website, the most important point that comes followed with the SEO steps is to get your website crawled by the search engine crawler. For this it’s very important that your website should possess some things that tempt the crawler everytime and it comes to your website to index it.

Some people don’t understand what they should do to get their website crawled soon by the search engine crawler. So below are few tips which would help you to get your website crawled soon by spiders.

• The reasons that Search engines crawl yours site late is because Search engine can’t see any potential links pointing to your site. So the first thing you should do to get your site faster crawled by Search engines, is to gain more quality links pointing to your website. More quality links are pointing to your site more search engines faster it crawls your site.
• If you don’t have Sitemap on your site, make one fast. Create sitemap soon with all your website links located in it and pace that on the server. Also make sure you link your sitemap to the top of the homepage only, so that when your homepage gets crawled your sitemap too gets crawled with all internal page links.
• Host is also a very important point one should take care off. If your website is hosted on slow server the possible that your website will get crawled soon will reduce a lot. So switch your website to a host server which is fast and specific.
• Updated your website with more unique information/content as regular as you can, this will show crawler that your website contains something new everytime it comes to your website.

Advanced Features of Google Analytics

Google analytics has come out to be one of the top analytical packages for all kinds of websites. It’ has emerged as a very imperative tool in the field of internet marketing. There are many features of Google Analytics and can help you do wonders with your website statistics.

The basic features that are offered in the account are like tracking top traffic/visits top visited and exit pages, top ranked keywords, Traffic sources ad much more. But these is a lot beyond this border line which many people don’t actually discover when they track there account. Let’s discuss few of them which will help you gain more knowledge about your website performance.

Tracking Particular link, banner and certain country clicks and RSS feed subscribers

If you want to track how many people clicked on a particular link or banner or an affiliate link on your site? How many people from a certain country click on your banner advert or even the number of visitors from Digg that clicked to sign up to your RSS feed. Google Analytics can track this for you quite easily by simply adding an onClick event to your hyperlink code.

a href="http://www.abc.com" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/outgoing/rssfeed')
Every time somebody clicks on the link above GA will register a page view on the page www.yoursite.com/outgoing/rssfeed. You can view the results in the Top content section by filtering the results by adding the term in filter box “outgoing”

To Track the downloads

Downloads can be tracked again using the onClick event as:

a href="http://www.abc.com/files/map.pdf" onClick="javascript:urchinTracker ('/downloads/map')

These enhanced features helps to track the website performance in more depth.

Yahoo! Updates Its Search Index Algorithm

Yahoo will be rolling out some changes to its ranking algorithm for crawling, indexing and ranking, throughout this update process visitor may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.

Flash Website - Difficult Time To Get In Search Results

Whenever you talk about Flash and search engines you hear about how the search engine crawlers/spiders are helpless of reading the content within the Flash file and thus your site will most likely not rank well within the results of a search. This of course is true and it is widely known.

Because search engine crawlers are designed to index HTML and still have difficulties reading content from within a Flash file, one must take different steps in getting their content on the page. Below is a list of steps that can be taken to get your content on the page.

• Place your content within noscript tags
• Place your content within object tags
• Use keyword descriptive title tags
• Use keyword descriptive meta tags

Latest Additions By Google

Latest Additions By Google

Google News Now On Earth

Google has added Google News to Google Earth.

Google News Comes To iPhone

The Google News launched a special interface for the iPhone. To access it, go to http://news.google.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Steps To Optimize Images On Websites

To optimize your website fully then you should take care of the images on the website too. If you're not optimizing images on your web site, you're missing out the huge traffic that may come to you website.

• Use Keywords in the Images file names.
• Use Keywords in image ALT tags.
• Optimize the WebPages nicely containing the images.
• Keep the image near supporting keyword rich content
• Limit the number of images per page
  

Yahoo Collaborates With McAfee To Provide Alerts To "Risky" Search Results

Yahoo has collaborated with McAfee to provide a new feature along with search result i.e. SearchScan. This technology figures out URLs which seems "risky" in the search results.

The search results which are “risky” to search engines are flagged with type of danger sign below the title (See the sample snapshot below). This new features warns users from downloading spyware and other malicious software from being downloaded on searchers' computers.

Yahooooooooooo!!! Glue Pages Launched In India

Glue pages are the combination of organic search results with visual images of your query from the best sites anywhere on the web.

Yahoo has launched Glue Pages Beta in Yahoo India. The Glue Pages combine organic search results on the left hand column with more visual images related to your query in the middle and right section of the page. The results contain images, videos, articles and more. Searching on Glue Pages Beta will help Users to receive more relevant, visually appealing search results from across the web in one topical page.

For example a search 'Laptops' returns standard search results on the left, in the middle results with images from ebay and in the end some videos. See the link http://in.search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=laptops&rd=r1&fr=sfp&glue=1

Google Facing Threat Through Cell Phones.

There is a big threat that Google has been facing. That threat is none other then but someone sitting in your pocket or purse. YES! It's your cell phone.

As more people use cell phones having tiny glass space. Google and its fellow online advertisers will have less space or what's called ad inventory, to place marketing messages for customers.
Google makes money selling ad inventory. And its ad inventory is diminished on a cell phone. As more people surf the Web on their cell phones, Google must cope with less space problem to place ads.

Yahoo! and Google Join Hands In OpenSocial Foundation

The two big online masters Yahoo! and Google have joined there hands together to support the OpenSocial developer platform for social networking sites. OpenSocial is an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the web.

Yahoo! has joined leading social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn to support the project, which Google has described as a non-commercial initiative that will work with external developers to enhance and improve the platform.

The list of partners include: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. The most conspicuous absentee from the alliance is Facebook, which has a developer platform of its own.

Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 – A New Webpage Spider

The new version of the Yahoo! Search crawler with some infrastructure updates has been launched called Yahoo! Slurp 3.0.

The new Yahoo! Slurp 3.0 recognizes the same user-agent and all robots.txt directives for 'Yahoo! Slurp,' though it'll identify itself as Slurp 3.0 in your web logs

Google Search Box Expanded to 32 words

You can now actually add much bigger queries in Google searcch box and Google will adjust the search box's size after you perform a search.

Earlier the scenario was different If you entered long queries in a Google search box, you would notice that it was difficult to edit that because Google optimized the size of the box for short queries.

Google has limited the queries to 32 words. The average number of words in a Google query was 4 at the end of 2007.

Google Sitelinks : More Valuable Search Results

Google sitelinks are designed to provide searchers with more valuable search results for their queries, rather its just the collection of links that appears below the result pages of a website. These links are linked to the main internal pages or sections of the website. The Google sitelinks are randomly and automatically chosen by Google's algorithm. Below is the snapshot of Google sitelinks.


How Website get Google Sitelinks in there Search results

1. The websites ranking at first for the keyword(s) generate the Sitelinks listing.
2. Website that are easily spiderable and have nicely structured navigation.
3. Website with fairly high natural search traffic.
4. High click through rates from the search results page.
5. Website having Useful outbound andInbound links from high quality sites.
6. Website age is several years or older.

Google Adds A New Search Box Within The Search Result Pages

Google has added a new additional search box in the search result pages that allows visitors or searchers to search within a website. There are many ‘terms’ for which you can see these additional search boxes in the result pages.

For example, when you search for term "wikipedia” in Google.com you'll get the additional search box in search result pages. See the Snapshot below

Google Says : Web Browsing and Searching Grow More Risky

As per the latest updates in Google its shows that 3 million unique URLs on more than 180,000 Web sites attempt to install malware on visitors computers.

According to a report published by Google, Web browsing and searching are becoming highly risky activities.

"In the past few months, more than 1% of all search results contained at least one result that we believe to point to malicious content and the trend seems to be increasing," said Niels Provos, a security engineer at Google (NSDQ: GOOG), in a blog post.

For more detailed information you can view the link below
http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2008/02/all-your-iframe-are-point-to-us.html

How To Improve The Link Structure Of The Website

Below are few steps that you can do to improve the rankings of targeted webpages on your website

• Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page.The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important it looks to search engines. Breadcrumbs navigation is a great help for the reach out of WebPages.
• Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website use targeted keywords in the links to these pages that are related to that page. The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website. But its very important to use keywords that are highly relevant and targeted.
• Make the links on your website absolute. Do not link to mypage.htm but to www.yoursite.com/mypage.htm
• Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren't important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn't be listed in search engines.
• If possible, remove unnecessary links from your web pages. fewer links you have on a page, the more important is the single link to the other pages on your site

Mosaic Cloaking: A New Technique Of Search Engine Spam

A new technique of Spam is here on the board, it’s named as Mosaic Cloaking. Well its purpose is same to get your webpage ranked high on search engines, but its slightly different form the Normal cloaking technique.

In Cloaking the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to regular web surfers. When a user is identified as a search engine spider, a server-side script delivers a different version of the web page, one that contains content not present on the visible page.

Where as in Mosaic Cloaking only a part of a webpage is replaced. For example, the blank space on a web page might be filled with keyword rich text when a search engine spider requests a page. The rest of the page remains unchanged.

But the after effects of both the types of cloaking are bad. Later or sooner search engine crawler will get to know about these Spamming techniques and will remove the website from their index. All major search engines consider cloaking to be a violation of their guidelines. For that reason, websites that use cloaking will be banned from the search results.

Enhanced Breadcrumbs For SEO

A navigation path, which allows users to understand their current location on a Web site, is often called a breadcrumb. The basic breadcrumbs templates are used to create an alternate navigation scheme on your pages. And looks like the following

Home > Section page > Item Page

This is great for your customers and adding relevancy to your pages, also from SEO point of view Breadcrumbs are a great mechanism for creating keyword-rich links between pages of the website

• The larger the site, more numerous these cross-links become. The “deeper” the page on a hierarchical site, the more links it will have to other pages.
• Breadcrumbs result in more links to important pages — those that have more subordinate pages
• Useful breadcrumbs typically use keywords, thus the links are automatically keyword rich.

Quick Review Points To Check Website SEO Friendliness

Check for Relevancy and Design: Is the website design speaking your targets and themes well to the visitor as well as search engines too. This can be nicely achieved through a nice part of keyword rich content present on your website. Keep in mind that most of the top search engines will rank your site depending upon the topic they determine you are offering.


Use of keyword rich META Tags: META tags located within the invisible source of your web page. They are designed to provide the details of your web site to visiting search engine spiders


Search Engine ‘Unfriendly Dynamic URL’s : Unfriendly dynamic URL’s are a common side effect of using a Content Management System that is not designed with search engine rankings kept in mind so do re-writing of the URL’s to make them into non-dynamic form


Polish & Optimize Text: You have to keep your text engaging as well as smartly optimized to present an obvious topic to the visiting search engine spiders or visitors coming to your website.


Check for technologies used on your website

• Frames: it makes your website less SEO Friendly, so avoid making use of frames else use ‘No Frames tags’.
• Flash: Flash Files makes your website less SEO friendly and heavy to load.
• Java script and CSS file: externalize it into .js file else place the java script code into the bottom.
  

Spot Check for Spam: some web designers add hidden text because they think it will help your rankings. This is entirely untrue and can cause extreme problems for your search engine visibility. Don’t use any spam techniques like keyword stuffing, cloaking, hidden text etc etc.


Navigation and Provide Clear Paths: Is the navigation within your site entirely graphical or programming oriented? In this case you should create a textual link menu at the bottom of your page

Search Wikia : Budding Search Engine

Search Wikia, the widely-awaited competitor to Google is launched. Internet is buzzing with early reviews and thoughts.

Well the master mind behind the search wikia Jimmy Wales says “Search Wikia is an extremely alpha project. It's a project to build a search engine and not a full-fledged competitor to Google yet. We want to make sure people understand that it's in its very early days."

You can check Search Wikia at http://alpha.search.wikia.com/

Which Link Type Will Help You To Get Higher Search Engine Rankings

There are a lot of talks online about the linkage process which process is more beneficial for business? is it one-way link, reciprocal link or three-way link. Which of these links help you to get higher search engine rankings?

Well a very realistic answer to all these queries is very simple and accurate.

• None of the link types (one-way, two-way or three-way) is worth more than the other; it’s just that a good inbound link from a trustworthy website will help you to get higher search engine rankings.
• It's important that the links to your website are from related sites and on-topic. If a one-way link is on a low quality page with links to every useless page then it won't count much. However, that's also true if the same page carries a one-way link or a three-way link.
• What exactly matters is a link from a related website and on trusted webpage. Links from high quality websites will help to get higher search engine rankings, If you want to improve your search engine rankings, try to get links from web pages that have something to do with your site.