Image courtesy : Google

Hiring a Search Engine Marketing company can go a long way in the promotion of your website. Here are some reasons why it helps:

1. SEM is cumbersome and complicated. It can be however done efficiently by an expert.
2. SEM experts have a deep understanding of the intricacies of search engines. They use this knowledge to the fullest to make the most for your website.
3. The price of professional search engine marketing services is almost always far lower than other forms of advertising and it offer a quick return on investment.
4. It is very important that SEM is done ethically, or your website may end up being banned. SEM experts are aware of this and they make sure no trouble is encountered.
5. SEM experts not only work towards bringing your website on the top in search engines, but explore all other ways to market your website.

Thus, it is in your best interests to hire a SEM expert to promote your website.

Have a look at the discussion:

One thing that I think is still overhyped is PageRank. People think, yeah, you do this computation on the web graph and then you just order all the pages by that [PageRank]. Yes, that computation is important but it’s just one of many things. And people say, “Oh, well you’re stuck if you don’t have that.” We never felt that way. We never felt that it was such a big factor. It’s got the catchy name and the name recognition, but we’ve always looked at all the available data….

There is this confusion that there’s this one component that’s called PageRank, but the whole thing [Google's algorithm] has [also] been called that. That was a mistake. We need some better branding.

We all know that Google has already tried to de-emphasize the Page rank factor several times but Google didn’t succeed in that.

Google Buzz

Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, Hi5… in the already cluttered world of social networking comes along another. Google has launched Google Buzz, integrated into its highly popular email interface, Gmail. It not only lets you share a piece of text, but images, videos, links, all in the framework of the Gmail interface. It is being seen as a toned down, downgraded version of Google Wave, which hasn’t really caught on yet. What is catching the fancy of most people is the integration of Google maps and the fact that Buzz can be used easily via a mobile device.

Google has been making many changes ever since the launch of Google. With the view of making things easier for users, Buzz was launched with the feature that you would be automatically following the people you chat with. Based on user feedback, this has now been changed and the user will now be asked before he/she follows other users.

Although Buzz is now also being seen as an invasion of privacy, it remains to be seen if it really can catch up with Facebook and Twitter.

Yahoo's Logo

Ask.com

Google’s very interesting logo (notice the heart)

]]> http://www.snvinfotech.com/seo-india/search-engine-logos-of-valentines-and-olympics/feed/ 0 http://www.snvinfotech.com/seo-india/skype-now-on-hdtv/ http://www.snvinfotech.com/seo-india/skype-now-on-hdtv/#comments Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:33:13 +0000 SNV InfoTech http://www.snvinfotech.com/seo-india/?p=398 The incredibly popular, Skype which allows users to make voice calls over the Internet, will now be available on HDTVs. Skype has announced that in 2010, their software will be available on HDTVs of Panasonic and LG.  720p HD quality video calling will be delivered at thirty frames a second and with a resolution of 1280 x 720. People can now make HD voice+video calls on an HD TV with an internet connection, for example the LG 26 inch LCD and Plasma HDTV and the Panasonic 201 Viera Cast HDTV.

The software will already be embedded into Panasonic’s 2010 VIERA CAST-enabled HDTVs and LG’s new line of LCD and plasma HDTVs. Pretty cool, as you can now talk to your friends and family who live far away, right from the comfort of your bedroom or living room, without using a PC. But there’s a catch. A webcam is not included. Users will have to buy HD webcams, which Panasonic and LG will make, with prices up to $200.

But with the interest in HD TV escalating, this new gadget may work, and will surely be interesting to use.

This shows us that the hotly contested search market is going through change due to a major shakeout. With its recent self re-invention, Microsoft has found itself again a major player in the market. Bing remains the smallest of the big three, but with its lightning fast product cycle, and friendly interface, not to mention strong search results; it seems only a short time until it finds a comfortable role as the second largest.

Bing’s momentum appears to be building both in terms of traffic and public acceptance. That is in part due to clever implementations of visual search and other shortcut tricks that make it more likely a search query will return exactly the factual information one is requesting. While Google may still dominate the sector, even if Bing becomes a strong second player in the space, that could mean a huge revenue boost for Microsoft.
The growing success of Bing asks the question – why is Yahoo losing share? The company will actually shut down its search algorithms sometime next year in favor of using the algorithms designed by Microsoft that power Bing. The most obvious reason for its declining share is that Bing is eating its lunch, a situation that Yahoo probably hoped would not occur when she signed the search engine licensing and advertising revenue sharing deal with Microsoft last summer. Bing has been making strong gains in the lucrative shopping vertical, a search space where Yahoo has long been the largest player.

For Yahoo, the risk of a total collapse in search is something the company has yet to contemplate but could possibly become a reality if Bing picks up considerable steam and Yahoo ends up trapped in a contract that hems in its ability to innovate in the search space. Apart from the big three, two other prominent but less popular search engines, Cuil and Ask are determined to fight harder and carry their search engine to the top.

So let us look at how Search Engine Optimization and creation of user friendly websites go hand in hand, how their motives are basically the same.

Webpage designing is the first and foremost aspect of a website development. As a webmaster, you must be a fan of Flash and might want to use it to make your website attractive. But you must note that apart from the small number of broadband users, such a website is deemed unfriendly by dialup connection users who form the majority. Moreover, the crawlers and spiders from search engine spiders will not be access or understand Flash and you will lose valuable incoming traffic from search engines. So make it a point to use less of Flash and more of those features which make your website user friendly as well as crawler friendly.

Broken hyperlinks are a major put-off for the visitors of your website. They irritate the visitors no end and often they go to a competitor’s website. Imagine a highly undesirable business scenario when a prospective customer chooses a product to purchase after reading about its features and then finds out that the link which leads him to the transaction window is broken. Also it is an established fact that websites with a large number of broken links do not feature prominently in search engine results. So ensure that there are no broken links in your website and repair the ones you find out as soon as possible.

Search engines are not very friendly with images you use on your website and so you must make the job easier for them by adding descriptive alt tags for all the images that you use. Such descriptive tags also help users who are visually challenged and help able users to understand the meaning and significance of the images. It is an absolute must to ensure that complete paragraphs are not included in these image files as search engines do not display them in their results. A website friendly with both search engines and visitors must have a sitemap for sure. This tool gets new web pages indexed by search engines without any delay. It also helps a user locate himself on the website and allows for easy navigation.

In conclusion, one can say that while designing a website, give equal consideration to both search engines and your visitors.

For sure, by now you have a great website disseminating every bit of information about your business, but what good it does if not many people visit it? You need to make sure it gets the relevant and sufficient traffic. After all, there little point decorating a Christmas tree if not many people would see it to appreciate it. As a new startup or a small business hoping to make it big, PPC holds great value for you. Used tactically, PPC can direct a lot of traffic to your website, resulting in higher business and better returns for the company.

Here’s what a well thought out PPC Campaign promises you:

1.  Cost effectiveness

You pay only when a customer clicks on the link. So you pay for what you get, not just for displaying the link and hoping someone would click it.

2.  Organized budget planning

PPC campaign is very easy to monitor. You can plan a daily, weekly or monthly budget for search engine advertising by doing a methodical analysis of the traffic obtained.

3.  Malleable in nature

The PPC strategy is extremely malleable ie it can be easily modified to suit your needs. This includes a change in target audience or addition/deletion of keywords.

4.  Remain in sight

In the cases that you do not get a click from a particular user, he/she at least reads the name of your business and you get visibility.

Take advantage of this incredible new marketing strategy. We at SNV InfoTech are pleased to inform you that we can help you design a fantastic PPC campaign which will do wonders for the traffic levels to your website. Please see link for getting a free PPC package.

This is the era of super tough competition. As a small business, it should be one of your top priorities to make sure the website of your business is not only informative, but also figures in the top search results to gain visibility.

SEO produces optimized pages that are relevant for both the search engines and users. The whole optimization cycle starts with a good website design. Search engine crawlers or spiders visit a website, pull together content from the website and it is then saved to the database of the search engine. Hence you should make that they receive fresh content. Stale content is fatal for the website. Make sure not to put up content that is unreadable by them. As a webmaster of a website for a small business, the sooner you realize that content is the king, the better it will be for the business.

The use of software like Flash and Silverlight should be limited. These are difficult for the crawlers to crawl. The use of HTML is recommended. The use of Javascript, especially that are embedded on pages, should be minimized. In fact, the script can be put in a different file and that external file can be included in pages. One must try to optimize everything in the website, even names of pictures used because the crawlers of search engines are becoming increasingly universal in their nature.

SEO is not instant. It takes time to see tangible results with SEO. Ethical SEO is any day much better than Machiavellian SEO. There is no dearth of people performing unapproved ways of conducting small business SEO. However attractive these techniques might seem, dishonest SEO is just detrimental to your website as it may end up being banned from search engine results forever. Also most unethical SEO firms never deliver on their unrealistic promises of traffic count.

Keyword research holds a lot of importance in SEO. Search engines do not reveal their search algorithms and they keep changing them regularly. In such a scenario, a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO Expert)  makes educated guesses based on his experience and tries to make your site better so that it features in the top tier of search engine results. To aid him in these guesses, he uses tools like keyword researchers to find out which keywords are the hot trend right now and then incorporates those in your website. If these keywords can be used in the title tags of the various webpages in your website, it can work wonders for your business.

Make use of the wonders of the modern internet to the maximum. This includes YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger/Wordpress, Twitter etc. Such social media interfaces help you in forwarding the cause of your website and attracting more visitors to it. Blogging is a great tool in your hands because a well written blog post has very little content that is non-search engine friendly. Their architecture, design and content has the potential to attract search engine crawlers.

You must try and get other good websites and people to link to your website.  Among the factors search engines take into account when ranking your pages for relevancy are the external sites that link to your pages. Having lots of highly-trafficked Web sites that are relevant to what you do or sell tells the search engines that yours is a perfectly legitimate site with good quality content, and that is bound to boost your “findability” factor in search queries.