Imagine a situation in which we’re assigned and identified with a particular number, which suggest how influential we are or are not. It would help decide whether one receives a job, a guest-room upgrade or some free samples at a high-profile supermarket. In case your influence score happens to be low, you wouldn’t get the promotion, the swanky suite of your choice or the complimentary offers. If you think this is science fiction, pause for a moment; it’s actually the case with millions of online social network users. Read the rest of this entry »

What has the new year in store for marketers on SEO landscape that has undergone a dramatic change with the rising stature, power and reach of the social media. The search engine optimization techniques and strategies are bound to witness a further churning in 2012. What can one expect on this count? Are there any definitive trends to give us a clue? Let us try to find out as part of an academic exercise, which can also be handy in practical terms in setting the SEO agenda: Read the rest of this entry »

As has already been reported, Facebook is gradually taking the Timeline to all its users. The new enhanced Timeline profile format also makes the popular social networking channel much more job-search friendly. It’s a resume, after all, when you pause and carefully look at it. From the cover image right at the top to the subsequent chronological organization, your Facebook profile effectively is a professional image booster, making it extremely relevant from your career point of view. So what does this really mean for prospective job seekers? Let us try to find out! Read the rest of this entry »

For Google, the bet lies on ‘personal’ aspect of search. The company now claims to explore your very own world, and the roll out the customized results. It will throw up only those results from billions of Web pages that are highly relevant to a specific user based on the material you and your Web-based connections share. Read the rest of this entry »

Google’s has already began adding Google+ brand pages in results, to leverage Google profiles for ‘rel=author’ tags. Google+ circles and +1s have been made visible in SERPs. This pattern, it’s felt, would become a concerted attempt on part of the search engine giant to link up promotional efforts in organic (search) results with the former’s login/verification system. In other words, it will become tougher to ensure SEO success sans using Google+ Read the rest of this entry »

Experian Hitwise has just recently analyzed the top one thousand search terms in the US for the year gone by, to come up with some interesting findings. According to its report, the world’s most popular social network (Facebook, which else?) has emerged as the top search term for one more year. Let us take a quick look at the US search scenario for 2011:  Read the rest of this entry »

The SEO advantage of a unique mobile version is that Google has a designated bot for the purpose of crawling and indexing mobile versions. If your mobile and regular sites are SEO-competent, your pages become even more search-friendly. Optimize the content and images by inserting the key terms found in your domain-specific Google AdWords mobile search. Sprinkle them throughout your site pages.

Also, avoid using any overlapping ads as they hamper the flow of your content. In the previous post, we have considered a few basics of optimizing your site for mobile and tablet users. Just to give a quick recap:

• First and foremost, checking out whether or not your site is optimized for the fast-evolving mobile and tablet generation. It must evolve in keeping with the changing technology landscape.
• Keeping your mobile website’s interface simple and page sizes small; making your content crisp, compact and visually appealing, and keeping the site regularly updated.
• Minimizing your site even while maximizing its searchability, plus testing your site’s mobile version on multiple devices cutting across models and brands (ideally of different platforms)
• Importantly, marketers must be well aware of the new mobile consumer behavior, to provide a overall thrust to your mobile SEO strategy.

Not all mobile browsers are compatible with Flash, video-audio players, frames, pop-ups, and JavaScript, which designers are keen to use. Even if they spice up the site, they are unusable for the people who visit your site via low-end mobile phones. Instead try to have in place a flexible mobile site for variable screen sizes plus resolutions. Scaling page elements by different screen sizes, instead of setting fixed pixel widths for your page elements is preferable to make your site compatible for a wide array of mobile phones.

The best way to optimize your e-commerce based offerings for mobiles is to develop an app. This will give your wireless presence the much needed competitive edge so as to stay ahead of your competition. An app can place the users directly in your virtual store. Last but not the least, consider the design options in terms of Google transcode and mobile subdomain. Employing Google’s configuration tool to transcode the site to mobile HTML from classic HTML won’t probably provide a unified experience to your users.

There is a chance of having content and images resized in unrestrained or unattractive ways. There is scope for, duplication of content and error pages. One way to avoid the overall poor user experience is to make a mobile subdomain specifically geared for your mobile website.

This can be done by creating a subdomain txt files, a key aspect for both search direction and indexing. A distinct mobile URL will prevent your mobile optimization from hampering your classic optimization and vice versa. Importantly, this will let the GoogleBot Mobile index the mobile site version for mobile searches.

If you follow the basics of it carefully, there is every chance that your customized mobile site will become usable and highly efficient for the target audience that you want to reach. Smartphone users are that much more likely to initiate actions like buying a product after viewing a mobile ad or reading a product review. The process of conversion is usually aligned to mobile search. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several areas that need to be considered when devising a website for wireless devices, keeping in mind specific requirements and mindset of users on the go. Layout, content format, coding, images and optimization are a few basic, albeit vital things that come into play. Here is a quick look at some of the aspects you should take into account before proceeding to create your own mobile site: Read the rest of this entry »

Mostly, SEO experts discuss important factors employed by top search engines for ranking. But not many of them talk of the non-ranking factors. In this post, we shall look at some of the aspects that can be tackled on the least priority basis simply based on an assumption that they do not give tangible benefits compared to the efforts and energy spent on them to boost your site’s search engine ranking. It’s not to say that these are areas to be ignored totally, but they should not take up unncesessary time and attention of yours. Read the rest of this entry »