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SEO: GOOGLE PERSPECTIVE [Part III]

Akshay Sura — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:59:16 +0000

In the two previous parts of this post, I discussed mostly about the general factors that help in getting a site optimized to the highest order of ranking on the Google search pages. In this last part, I will concentrate more on some of the technical factors.

Images used in a site should have separate “alt” attribute: After going through this sub-head, those who are not that sound technically might have a question that what is this “alt” attribute? Well, to be precise and simple, the “alt” attribute is the alternative text for the images that are used in a site. Suppose, a user is watching your site on a browser, that does not support images, and as a result, the user will be unable to see the images you have used in your site. In this case, the description used in the “alt” attribute will help to give information about the image, to the user. Apart from this, you can even use the image as a link, and in this case, the content of the “alt” text will function similarly, as the anchor text does. If you have planned to do something like this, you should always fill the “alt” text with a brief and simple description of the image. This helps Google to understand better about the page, to which the image link is directing to. However, it is advised not to use too many images as links unnecessarily, especially, when the same purpose can be fulfilled with simple anchor text or text links.

Proper use of robots.txt: Using robots.txt properly can help the search engines to know whether they can access a particular part of a site or not. The file for robots.txt is normally placed in the root directory of a site. You may not want some parts of your site to be crept by the search engines, may be because they might not help the users if shown in the search results. In that case, you will have to create the robots.txt file for that. There are certain other ways to prevent some parts of your site from showing in the search results. You can add “Noindex” to the robots meta tag, or can even use some of the Google Webmaster Tools to eliminate the parts that have already been crept.

Use of rel=”nofollow” for links: You might have a site with a blog, which is open to public commenting. In addition, these blog commenting pages are highly at risk to spamming. Therefore, in order to avoid this, nofollowing the links that are added by the commenting users, can guarantee that the reputation of your site is not hampered. In case, you want to assure for the user added links, you can avoid using “nofollow” for the links. However, while doing this, you will have to be extra careful. Because, you might link to sites, which Google believes as being spam, and as a result, the reputation of your site might be at stake.

These are the factors that I find as most important about SEO from Google’s perspective. I hope, by now you have a clear idea about how to go about optimizing your website in the highest order of ranking in the Google search results. So, do not waste any more time and get going with your SEO plans!

Semantic Search Engine Hakia Now Says It Can Filter Results By How Credible They Are

Erick Schonfeld — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:58:49 +0000

On the Internet, nobody knows your site is a dog (to paraphrase the famous New Yorker cartoon). At least not yet. Semantic search engine Hakia wants to change that. Ask.com is not the only search engine rolling out a redesign today. So is Hakia, which is introducing tabs to its search interface. One of the tabs is “credible sites.” These are results from sites that have been vetted by librarians and information specialists (although anyone can suggest sites). So far, Hakia has built out a directory of credible sites around health, medical, and environmental issues.

The “credible” results tend to come from government, university, medical, and news sites. For instance, here are the credible results for “green buildings” and “common cold.”

The idea is if your site is a dog, it won’t get on the list. While this white-list approach could improve the quality of results, it also seems way too easy to game. Any spammer can try to get their site on the truthful and authoritative list. And they will.

Hakia’s redesign includes some other new tabs as well. Namely “news,” “images,” and “meet others.” (No, this third one is not a semantic dating service. It is a social feature that lets you join groups and discussion forums around the same topics that you are searching for). The results are all based on semantic matches within each domain. (See the screenshots below). But I am not sure how much better they are than Google’s. For instance, here is Hakia’s image search results for “global warming”. Now try the same search on Google image search. In both cases, the results are underwhelming.

Cloud + Client

Steve Gillmor — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:49:23 +0000

This week two giants spoke to the technology wave known as cloud computing. Larry Ellison called it a new label on what everyone is doing already. He acknowledged he was going along with it to keep his marketing and sales guys happy, but basically he called bullshit on it.

Steve Ballmer talked at a deep level about intelligent caching between the cloud and the client. Over an hour of snappy questions by Ann Winblad and Obamaesque nuance from the Microsoft leader let some significant cat out of the bag. No longer software plus services, the net of Ballmer’s signals was cloud + client. If you believe as Jason Calacanis does that we’re on the brink of a startup depression, the technology industry should be very very afraid.

Bill Gates has been thinking so far out ahead for so long that we’ve grown complacent in understanding how long it takes for Microsoft to reposition itself. Most observers still think the company is caught in an intractable wedge between the revenue of the Office group and the release cycles of Windows. The forthcoming Windows 7 announcements at the Professional Developers Conference just before Election Day in Los Angeles can already be understood as a point evolution, more like a service pack from the old Windows NT days when Redmond was trying to absorb consumer Windows into the IT server stream.

Back then, the twinkling in the eye of what became .Net was owned by the Exchange group, who by the accident of the competition with Lotus and Netscape in the Y2K messaging rollup was the owner of Outlook Web Access and a URL addressable hook into the file system. The server code that processed those requests was ASP.Net, and it was first released as a service pack upgrade to Internet Information Server. Within a year, Scott Guthrie had a Visual Studio plug-in that allowed rapid authoring of these applications, laying the groundwork for much of what Guthrie now owns as today’s service pack aka Silverlight and Mesh.

Service packs have always been where Microsoft performs its own jujitsu on itself. What they’re called is irrelevant; what they do is allow innovation and politically incorrect projects to get traction before the normally hyper-aggressive power brokers inside the company regain control and shut down the insurrection. By that time, the market has usually shown the new direction is strategic, and the changes are absorbed in a reorg. But the underlying reasons why these “skunkwork” projects break out are deeply understood by Gates, often years before they emerge in the dynamic of the time.

Steve Ballmer prides himself at underplaying his technical understanding, but he’s gotten away with it for years with Gates as Johnny to his Ed. Now, he has little cover, and at the Churchill Club on Thursday he didn’t bother to hide his command of the details: Virtualization, where he identified the classic Microsoft strategy of moving in and commoditizing the space from 5% to 80% market share. The balanced model of computation, from smart set top boxes to smart apps painted to dumb clients – Ballmer was not talking about plans but the tail end of execution.

Listen closely and he’s talking about applying the right amount of intelligence (software) at the right time. Gone is the software (read client) plus services (read cloud) mantra, discarded now as Windows is in the process of receding behind the user’s perception in favor of the applications that Gates says have always driven the success of the company. The service pack model for Windows 7 is being pushed to the cloud and virtualized, with updates streaming down to the user on demand rather than bundled on the dead DVD.

This is the SlingBox platform of application virtualization, and just because Google has pioneered it doesn’t mean Gates didn’t anticipate it years ago. Spray the bits onto a range of devices from phone to big screen, and neutralize the pain of migrating the hardware base with a Mesh/Silverlight OS that replaces Windows on the client with Windows in the cloud. Ellison is right – go along with the name change but stay ahead in the apps race by making the decision about where the code resides purely a function of caching and predictive push.

It’s like the Obama/McCain debate. Watch it live and McCain won. Watch the moments as sequences, ranked and streamed according to the logic of each section, and Obama won. Listen again to Ballmer and you hear a tough competitor, cagey and jovial, more relaxed than I’ve seen him in years. It’s the calm of the lion, relaxing in the shade and watching the world, his world, lining up.

RealScoop Tells You When Politicians And Celebrities Are Lying

Don Reisinger — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 14:12:25 +0000

Have you ever wanted to know when politicians are lying? A startup called RealScoop thinks it can nail it down for you in real-time with the help of voice analysis technology that it claims, is used widely in law enforcement and fraud prevention.

Dubbed the Believability Meter, RealScoop’s analysis technology analyzes over 100 vocal elements of the human voice and performs over 1,000 calculations per second to find out if a politician or celebrity is telling the truth.

The site itself features a bunch of videos collected from outside sources that are played in its own player. The player features a meter that changes dynamically as it analyzes what’s being said. If it believes the person is lying, the meter turns red and moves towards the “highly questionable” area. If it believes the person is telling the truth, the meter stays green and in the “believable” section.

I watched a few of the videos on the site and found it questionable, to say the least. Maybe there is some real evidence to prove that this sort of technology can tell if a person is lying or not, but let’s face it — there’s no way to prove it and I’m not sure, after watching the videos, how a person can go from believable to questionable by uttering a few simple phrases like “uh.”

I’m sure the highly political among us will find value in this to help prove their point that the candidates they support are telling the truth and those they do not are lying, but the more objective among us will see this for what it is: pure rubbish.

What is Microsoft Thinking? Some Thoughts on the Microsoft Commercials

John Biggs — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:17:56 +0000

Reader DjCarbon pinged me this morning with an interesting bit of news. Above you see the first two entries for the search “i’m a PC” in Google – Apple has essentially hijacked the dialogue about personal computers, forcing Microsoft to take a stand through their new commercials. The “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercials are odd and insidious but, as we see here, Apple has distanced itself from the profit-averse desktop PC market and created a new category. It’s not a PC you’re buying, fanboi, it’s not a beige box with a keyboard and a crappy LCD. No, you’ll never have to open the case, Mac-lover. You’ll never have to upgrade the operating system. When you walk into the Apple store you aren’t shopping for a PC – a personal computer, to reengage that acronym’s original meaning. You’re buying something much cooler, right?

Now, however, Microsoft is attempting to wrest that concept back from Apple. Think about the advertising thus far. We began with the Mojave Project, a Folger’s Taste Test involving folks who probably know Windows as the program that boots up when they walk into the office in the morning. This made it clear that the original “Wow” tag-line Microsoft used for Vista was still applicable – clearly the “Wow” didn’t stick so they had to reinforce it – and reminded us that Vista still exists. The Mojave commercials attacked the first complaint about OS X vs. Windows: interface creativity. Whereas OS X has been using photo-realistic icons and sexy docks for years, Windows has been as attractive as the interface on a stud finder – press a button and something that you don’t understand causes the device to blink and beep, you drill, and 99% of the time you generally trust that you got the right outcome (but sometimes you hit a power line and blow everything up). While this is OK for power tools, this is sub-par for a computer operating system.

Vista was designed to inject some life into that tired old paradigm, to make the operating system as cool as the games that were being played on it and the applications it was running. In my mind, they succeed but clearly the majority – especially in IT – doesn’t think so so maybe they can’t talk up the technical points anymore. So where should they go next? Convince people that Vista is fun and quirky.

We then visit Jerry and Bill. OS X and Linux have faces – Jobs and Linus – and stories. Windows was spat out whole by a faceless organism, something like the afterbirth of robotic coding grubs hidden in the spire of the Space Needle. So you have a nebbishy little man and his goofy sidekick reframe the rhetoric of PCs. It’s not about the computer, it’s about Bill just as Apple isn’t really about the hardware but about the salesman.

Here’s Bill’s auto-reply:

this is an exciting time… wait, you know what? it’s always an exciting time. i am as excited and passionate about Microsoft as i was when we were Micro-soft. the goal never changes for us, so everyday seems like the first day, and the first day was really just about one thing: connecting people.

maybe this didn’t answer your question at all. but I wanted to say it anyway. i mean, this is an auto-response email. and i will try to answer a few of them, but they will all say the same exact thing…

this is an amazing company. and, yes, the future really is delicious.

Mmmmmm…

Bill

Vista, you see, is the cake. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, you’re probably not the audience for this commercial but to everyone else the cake isn’t a lie – it’s just moist and delicious. So the face of Microsoft has been changed from buttons and windows to a nerd doing the robot. We’re on the way to anthropomorphizing this product in the consumer’s mind.

So now we have the “I’m a PC” commercials. All of the folks with a Windows.com email address are actual Microsoft employees. They’re separating Microsoft and Windows from the hardware on which it runs and pulling the image of a man in beige out from under Apple’s messaging. Once you see Deepak Chopra saying “I’m a PC,” the reasoning goes, you’re less likely to accept that the affable fool John Hodgman truly represents the Windows PC market. This sort of torsion – the spinning of concepts to achieve Microsoft’s end result – is probably the real goal. They don’t want to be a physical box anymore, they want to be the cool product that happens to come inside that box. With companies like HP and Dell installing Linux as an optional OS and Apple planning – as far as we can tell – a considerably cheaper MacBook, Microsoft needs to convince all of us that Windows and, most importantly, Windows Vista, is still a great product.

Will they succeed? Yes. Apple will phase out its commercials and Windows Vista will sell millions of copies on pre-loaded machines. The only downside at this point is what Apple and Linux will continue to do to erode Microsoft’s market share, not to mention Google and the entire Web 2.0 infrastructure. Microsoft will be with us long after we’re all dead and gone. It is an example of American ingenuity and reach, and it serves a global market in ways even the robber barons and colonizers couldn’t imagine. But Windows is essentially a commodity, something like water. It’s easy to convince people to buy water in cool new packages but in the end, if given the choice, it’s hard to convince people to stick to one brand of water or, if offered water for free, convince them to turn around and pay for it. Microsoft is turning from a software company to a “service.” They can’t become a verb like Google and they can’t become a lifestyle like Apple but they can be a cool guy in a fleece vest and they can be Deepak Chopra. They can be anything you want them to be, really, as long as it’s not an ugly box under your desk that you accept and on occasion hate.

LiveBar Adds A Little Strip Of Community To Any Site

Mark Hendrickson — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:01:57 +0000

LiveWorld is a publicly traded company that’s been around since 1996 and is best known for its white labeled social networks. These are online communities that LiveWorld helps clients build up around their existing brands, and they often take a good deal more time and effort to set up than communities created on top of self-service platforms like Ning or KickApps.

However, LiveWorld is making a significant foray into “out-of-the-box” communities with the release of LiveBar, a widget-like site addition that brings community features to any website using only one line of JavaScript.

The LiveBar consists of a thin strip that sticks to the bottom of the browser window and displays social content related to the page. It’s reminiscent of Facebook Chat or the upcoming community instant messaging offering from Meebo. But instead of facilitating instant messages, the LiveBar shows three types of user contributions: Conversations, Soapboxes, and Shouts.

Conversations are essentially lightweight forum threads where users can post messages and solicit responses. Soapboxes are akin to blog posts and Shouts are like tweets in that they’re restricted to 140 characters. In the LiveBar’s simplest implementation, these pieces of UGC are associated with individual URLs, so when you move from one page to the next, you see different content.

However, they can also be tied together into so-called bundles so that discussions form across pages that relate to each other. The LiveBar can also be rolled out across multiple sites on different domains, with bundles providing social glue around pages and sites that were formerly fragmented.

The biggest downside to the LiveBar (which could also be seen as its greatest virtue) is its discreetness. Visitors are prone to overlook it entirely because it sits so low and short on the page. To combat this tendency, LiveWorld has developed a suite of widgets that hook the LiveBar into the actual page layout. The widgets can be used, for example, to print the most recent conversations or solicit new ones. I expect that most publishers will deploy these extra widgets to get the most bang for their buck. After all, the LiveBar isn’t free; like other LiveWorld services, it’ll cost you thousands of dollars just to get it up and running.

LiveWorld plans to add more flexibility and functionality to the LiveBar over time, with chat in particular on the way. This will put LiveWorld in direct competition with Meebo, although Meebo’s specialty in online instant messaging should make for a superior product.

Both Tulane University and A&E Biography already plan to use LiveBar on their respective sites.

Marissa Mayer Clarifies: Search Is Only 10% Done, Not 90%

Michael Arrington — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:32:24 +0000

I spoke to Google’s Marissa Mayer at TechCrunch50 on Monday (a little after she we celebrated Google’s 10th birthday with cupcakes) and asked her about the search is “90-95%” solved story over the weekend. She said she’d be posting a clarification on the Google blog. That clarification just went up, here.

In the original article, published in the LA Times, Marissa says search is “90 to 95%” solved:

Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%. How do we monetize new forms of content as they come online such as video, maps and books. How do we help content providers transition their businesses online and build healthy businesses.

Today Marissa clarifies, suggesting that her real point is that the first 90% of the search problem is solved, but that was the easy part. The last 10% will actually be 90% of the real work, she says, and it will take decades or longer to complete it. She also compares search today to the fiields of biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s.

We’re all familiar with 80-20 problems, where the last 20% of the solution is 80% of the work. Search is a 90-10 problem. Today, we have a 90% solution: I could answer all of my unanswered Saturday questions, not ideally or easily, but I could get it done with today’s search tool. (If you’re curious, the answers are below.) However, that remaining 10% of the problem really represents 90% (in fact, more than 90%) of the work. Coming up with elegant, fitting and relevant solutions to meet the challenges of mobility, modes, media, personalization, location, socialization, and language will take decades. Search is a science that will develop and advance over hundreds of years. Think of it like biology and physics in the 1500s or 1600s: it’s a new science where we make big and exciting breakthroughs all the time. However, it could be a hundred years or more before we have microscopes and an understanding of the proverbial molecules and atoms of search. Just like biology and physics several hundred years ago, the biggest advances are yet to come. That’s what makes the field of Internet search so exciting.

For the record, I agree. Search is in its infancy, which is why I keep using that image of a pre-World War I airplane. To declare search “solved” today would be the same as saying powered flight was solved way back then. We’re just getting started.

A New Way to Search: Use Your Mouse

Don Reisinger — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:19:48 +0000

Here at TechCrunch 50, there are a slew of interesting companies worth writing about on-stage. But I came across one in the Demo Pit that’s just as noteworthy.

Called KallOut, the service allows you to search the Web from a Word doc or email without minimizing the screen and going to the Web. It replaces that with a couple clicks of a mouse. According to the company, its research shows that users can search the Web up to ten times faster by using KallOut. I’m not sure it’ll be that fast, but it’ll definitely improve efficiency.

After installing KallOut, you can click on a small KallOut box over every supported term (there are 100 million of them) contained in documents, email, or websites. (The boxes are small, and not too distracting). By clicking that box, a pop-up is displayed and shows the best search terms for YouTube, Wikipedia, Google, IMDb, and more. If you want to view one of those links, KallOut displays a small window bringing you to the site, while still letting you work in the document or online. It’s not too useful when you’re in your browser, but KallOut’s pop-up box could be extremely useful when you’re working in a Word document and you don’t want to keep switching between windows to input a search term into Google.

KallOut can search a slew of sites, including Twitter, The New York Times, and those mentioned above, and should offer more support for other services soon.

Is Search Really 90% Solved?

Michael Arrington — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 21:53:52 +0000

Jessica Guynn has an excellent interview with Google's Marissa Mayer today about Google's first ten years (today is arguably Google's tenth birthday). Good stuff in there - Marissa talks about Google's accomplishments in search and advertising, and looks forward to a future where cloud computing becomes pervasive. Marissa also says she hopes to still be at the company in another ten years. But one thing caught my eye. Marissa says search is "90 to 95%" solved:

Search is an unsolved problem. We have a good 90 to 95% of the solution, but there is a lot to go in the remaining 10%. How do we monetize new forms of content as they come online such as video, maps and books. How do we help content providers transition their businesses online and build healthy businesses.

Here's the thing. I don't think search is even close to being solved yet. In a May 25 post I talked about how early I think we are in search, and why a competitive search market is so important to make sure innovation keeps happening:

The Race For Attention Tightens Online As McCain Gains On Obama

Don Reisinger — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:12:59 +0000

Now that convention season is over and the candidates have about eight weeks before they find out who will lead the United States for the next four years, it’s time we compare each candidate’s attention online as we head into the final stretch.

According to Google Trends data, Republican candidate John McCain is quickly gaining ground on Barack Obama and witnessed a spike in searches the day he announced Sarah Palin as his running mate. However, Obama witnessed an even greater spike at the same time, perhaps due to his convention speech the night before and some comparative searches pertaining to Palin.