Search engine optimization UK is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, sem, smo, pay per click advertising, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully speeding a site. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spam dexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indices.
If you are new to SEO and have only begun learning about the different ways through which you might be able to effectively promote your website then you must’ve already encountered online directory submissions. This is essential to the success of your business because not only are these directories great for link building but it is also effective when it comes to generating targeted traffic for your website. How? Basically, these directories organize every link submitted to them by category and as such, people would be able to easily locate what they are interested in. So, for example, if you place your website under the category for “technology” only those who are interested in technology would be able to find your listing. Of course, when it comes to website traffic, you would want people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. Now, whilst all of these things sound amazing and truly beneficial for your website, there is one drawback to using automatic directory submission for website promotion. This would be the fact that to be able to make it work effectively, you would need to submit your website to as many directories as you can.
Doing so would certainly be time-consuming and tedious. After all, not everyone has enough hours in a day to accomplish something like that whilst being able to maintain the other aspects of their website promotion strategies. Luckily, there is a way for you to bypass all the hard work and go straight to the results. How? Automate directory submission. Basically, if you opt to give it a try, automating your directory submissions would certainly cut down the time you would have to spend submitting your website to various directories in half. It makes use of a software that would do all the work for you, one that would be able to submit your website to hundreds of directories within the shortest amount of time possible. So if you don’t feel inclined to manually do the work yourself, do consider getting an automated directory submission software.
Update: In a speech today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called upon China to investigate the attacks on Google and the State Department will reportedly file “a formal protest over the complaints.”
Original Article: Google may try to continue with operations in China, even if it shuts its search engine down due to censorship. You must remember that Google is much, much more than just a search engine, and the censoring search results doesn’t necessarily come into play in all other aspects of its business.
According to the New York Times, Google will be holding talks with Chinese government officials soon, which will likely determine the fate of Google’s operations in the country, and to what (if any) extent those operations will continue to exist.
“In most countries, Google draws the majority of its revenue from ads that appear on its search engine, but the No. 1 source of revenue in China comes from ads that Chinese companies place on Google’s sites in the United States,” reports Miguel Helft with the Times. “A person knowledgeable about Google’s business in China said ads that run on a network of Chinese Web sites are the company’s second-largest source of revenue in the country. Google can retain both of those if it is allowed to keep a sales force and advertising network there.”
The question is, is the Google China situation going to be an all or nothing scenario? We will probably know soon enough if said talks get underway (according to the Times they will be in the coming days and weeks).
On a related note, the Wall Street Journal has spotted that Google is showing ads on search results related to the situation that point to the company’s official blog post that announced its decision to stop censoring search results in China.
Google has made some changes to the way ads shown to Gmail users are selected. If you use the service, you have probably noticed that Google often shows ads that are somehow related to the content of whatever piece of email you are currently reading. If you have noticed this, you have probably also noticed that sometimes the ads don’t seem to have anything to do with your conversation whatsoever.
Google has decided that instead of showing completely irrelevant ads in such cases, it will just dig back into another conversation from your Gmail usage, and show you ads related to that. This is illustrated in the clip below.
“Let’s say you’re looking at a confirmation email from a hotel in Chicago. Next to your email, you might see ads about flights to Chicago,” explains Gmail Product Manager Steve Crossan. “But sometimes, there aren’t any good ads to match to a particular message. From now on, you’ll sometimes see ads matched to another recent email instead. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren’t any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email instead.”
Google is careful to point out that it doesn’t store any extra information to show these ads. It just picks a different recent email to match. It’s all automated, and no humans are involved in picking the ads. The process is compared to Gmail’s spellchecker. Google also notes that no email or personal information is shared with advertisers.
The change will be rolling out over the next several days, so if you are still seeing ads completely irrelevant to any conversation you’ve had, you may not have the new system implemented yet.
Last summer it was discovered that Google was testing breadcrumbs in search results (breadcrumbs being the hierarchical display commonly used in site navigation. For example: Home Page>Product Page>Product A Page). Then in mid-November, Google announced that it was rolling out the use of breadcrumbs in search results on a global basis. What this means for webmasters is that if you can get your breadcrumbs into Google’s results, you essentially have more links on the results page. You have a separate link for each page in the breadcrumb trail.
The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don’t get with regular search results.
Google’s move was generally well received. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, “It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its “semantic” period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links.”
Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, “Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???” Google’s Matt Cutts responded:
Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the “early days” for breadcrumbs.
“Think about the situation with sitelinks,” he says. “Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time.”
In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. “Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time,” he says.
He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.
While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the “>” used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.
