A recent patent application from Google describes the way they make use of previous query for influencing the advertisements that pop up during a search.

The patent describes the ways in which the search engine decides the relation between a current and previous query. This is used to determine whether they should encourage ads that support both queries.

The patent clearly describes the way they expand the search query for matching with various advertising keywords. This happens when there is no previous query from the searcher. In such a case, the search engine will look for related words and will perform query broadening.

Ads are shown mostly based on the words which relates to the particular query. This is obtained through getting information through clustering tools and various other systems.

This patent describes how search results could be expanded through a web search. This indicates the instance during which there are no results for any query entered by the user. Google will also look at various overlapping words in those queries which happened during the search, for displaying results to users. Previous queries in this way will relate to the sponsored links which are highlighted on the top of the pages which are shown as results.

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If you’ve done keyword research in the past, which I’d assume you have since you’re reading this blog, then you have probably used Google’s keyword external tool. It’s free and gives you a pretty good idea for search volume. I’ve never relied on the competition graph that they show, though. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve manually checked for competition and found it to be way off from what it shows.

Google now has an enhanced search tool for all your keyword research. It is supposed to take your website’s keywords and compare them to the volume of searches that are actually done. Ideally, it gives you ideas for keywords you’re not already using.

The Google Sktool was featured by BestRank.com as a must have research tool. So, today I was playing around with it, and I have to say I have big doubts about how accurate this new tool is. I’m seeing some very large variations between the traditional keyword tool and the new, search one. Take this for an example… I picked out a travel blog that had a post about Seychelles in it. Google’s Sktool gave me the following results:

Well, that’s not too shabby. It suggests “north island Seychelles”, which has over 1,000 searches on average every month and I didn’t come up with a crazy number of possible competitors. However, now I head to the good old, basic keyword tool. Here’s what it says for the exact searches on average per month:

What the heck? I don’t know about you, but dropping from over 1k searches to just over 200… that makes a difference to me. So I guess the question is which of Google’s keyword tools are more accurate? Sure, there were other comparisons I did that were, at least within the same ball-park. But there were many that were nowhere close. Have you used the new tool? Have you compared them?

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It is true that one hosts a website in order to profit from it in whatever capacity. As such, it comes a shocking blow to know that as of 2008, officials in Thailand have blocked viewership to over 2300 websites to locals.  The major reason cited for such mass blockage is security and defamation of the government.

This becomes important keeping in mind that the political scenario in Thailand is not too stable and anything that’s cited against the king isn’t taken too well. Sites banned also include pornographic sites. The strange part of this analysis is the 90% of these sites are hosted overseas which means that international website owners stand to suffer. What may be viewed as acceptable and informational content elsewhere in the word is a taboo in Thailand?

Banned sites include those containing cartoons, articles, blogs and even YouTube videos. Thailand isn’t the first country to be practicing such large scale banning and this is popularly carried out in China too. In fact China tops the list in terms of stringency but news of banned sites elsewhere will influence website owners to review their content so as to not face the ire of threatened governments across the globe.

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hakia, the semantic search engine, just came out with its Syndication Web Services for web publishers or businesses looking to provide semantic search on their sites. Syndication Web Services provide the semantic technology which powers hakia. It delivers an XML feed with options to customize the feed.

The Syndication Web Services technology offers 30,000 free searches per day which is also free of advertising. This offer is only available to early adopters until they fill up their partners’ quota. These are some of the interesting features of Syndication Web Services:
Web Search -Provides search results from the entire web
Vertical Search – Provides search results from a particular vertical such as, health, or from a particular database.
News Search – Provides news articles for the given query.
Categorizer – Helps to identify categorical items from a given text ( can be a text block or URL)
Summarizer – Displays a summary of a given text block/URL. Will be of most use to content management systems.
Characterizer -Helps to identify and expand various keywords, phrases or tags; perfect for SEM professionals and publishers.
TMR (Text Meaning Representation) – Displays ‘text meaning representation’ of a given text block, most useful for core technology development.

According to Dr. Riza Berkan, CEO of hakia, this new hakia implementation is meant to be useful to a wide variety of applications, right from advertising to even document management. The best results will be seen by webmasters with complex projects, as they will benefit from the unique improvements made possible by the semantic search technology.

Now we come to Russell, a small time advertiser who like thousands of others had used Google’s AdWords to advertise one of his sites, WorldLabel.com. All was going fine until one day Russell noticed that seemingly spammy campaigns had been set up in his account.The site being advertised was “lastminute.com” which claimed to offer a loan of $1500 instantly, and the keywords for this campaign were variations of “loans” ,“fast cash” and so on. A little research showed that Russell had received a “phishing” email that had looked like an official email from Google asking him to login to his account to change some settings. In this case, Russell was saved by AdWords’s abuse filter and has since then changed his password. But for those of you hearing those alarm bells ringing, the best thing to do when you recieve such email is to ignore it. If you just can’t ignore, then never click on it, open a new window and type in the actual URL (in this case the AdWords home page) manually.

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If you start delving into the history of search engine optimization and its paradigm, you will find keywords have always played a vital role in search activities as well as bringing visitors to your website. As soon as the concept had been brought to the broad day light, people started stuffing keywords here and there in the website and in some cases even people have adopted the unethical way of camouflaging keywords unnecessarily. It has been also noticed that people have tried to hide keywords under the shade of images or even plain text of the website.

We tend to forget that search engine crawlers have improvised much today by the application of robots and any anomaly or exceptional behavior for any website can not escape the eyes of the spiders and crawlers. So, the search engine has taken no time to identifying such websites and some of them have been even panelized. Now what to do? On one hand keyword stuffing helps in ranking and visibility, on the other hand stuffing may even award a penalty.

We have got very clear cut suggestion over here to address the keywords issues. You need to first prepare your content for your sales activity. Once you have framed the initial content, now research the keywords for each of them. We hardly believe in the concept of segmentation of keywords like primary, secondary, tertiary etc, though many SEO companies and consultants emphasize on such divisions. You need to find out the main sales jargons from your content and perform the research activities accordingly. We insist NOT to increase the keyword density just for the sake of keyword stuffing. Rather use the keywords proportionately, which never distorts the meaning or objective of the content. Be very careful and nitty-gritty like spelling errors annoys the crawlers just like the normal visitors at your site.

Never try to hide keywords behind as crawlers and spiders are intelligent enough and even look at the HTML codes, before sending their observation to the search engine databases. Rather you can use the keywords in title tags and Meta Tags. Usage of keywords in H1, H2 etc. are NOT mandatory. You can also use the keywords intelligently in ALT Tags.

Finally we want to repeat, never underestimate the intelligence of crawlers and spiders. Don’t be too artificial, rather normal attitude of yours will help you in ranking!

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Cluttered websites have got a more repelling impact just as complete disarray results in hayware. If the web page portrays too much information and that too presented in a cluttered way it becomes highly irritating to the visitor, as they become more confused than convinced. An effective website always focuses on neatness revealing systematically organized content and images to create a positive vibration in the visitor’s mind. It is not only the content and images, a website demands a clean piece of code and script also.

Presentation of content can be nicely done using several tags like h1, h2, h3 and different user defined styles. Images have to be embedded with the meaningful ALT tag. Title tags become highly useful in many cases. Please take note that even w3c insists on usage of the ALT tag vividly. If you want to use flash movies or animated gif files, they should also follow the basic nomenclature rules. In case of Flash, it is better to convert to the html version, so that the crawler can read them easily. Remember Search Engine crawlers and spiders also emphasize on tags like h1, h2, <strong> etc just like a normal visitor. Never be in the habit of stuffing keywords unnecessarily, which again draws the attention of the crawlers. You can simply take the example of a separate style sheet file, which not only enables you to reuse the code by repetition of definition of each style in every page, it also helps the web page to look clean.

Most of the web pages demand some kind of scripting to be embedded. It may be a mouse rollover script or color changing script to highlight some of your important texts or messages. Whatever the reason may be it is preferable to segregate the script in separate files. An example may be a java script may be stored in a .Js file and only the embedding can be done in the original web page. If the codes are properly commented it not only helps the developers to debug, it also helps the crawlers and spiders. Use the concept of objects and classes as much as possible, which reduces the size of the web page drastically.

We must mention that get out of the habit of camouflaging keywords in your content or tags. Keyword research had never been easier before. You have got plenty of tools like Wordtracker, Google/ Yahoo Keyword Research tools etc. So, you can easily find out the most used keywords, but never try to clutter them in your web page. Change the content accordingly as genuine and fresh content always cuts ice in the reader’s mind, which is at the threshold of every seo technique.

So, go ahead, start cleansing your WebPages right away and wait for the next updates from the search engine crawlers.

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When considering what to put in your Meta Description, it’s important to know how to write for people so that they will have something interesting to read along with having your keywords in such a way that the search engines will pick up on them as well.

No matter what type of site you have, you will want to make sure that the keywords you are targeting are located in the meta description in a natural flowing way.  If you have a hard time writing like this, you can always hire someone to write them for you so that you end up with the best possible meta description you can have.  Just be sure to include your keyword list so that your writer can implement them for you.

Try getting your main keywords in the first few words of your meta description.  If you are targeting both the plural and singular version of the word, you can use this “|” to break them up.  You can make it interesting reading to real people by using descriptive words to go along with your keywords and work them in so that it will be beneficial for both the reader and the search engine.

Don’t spam your meta description with unnecessary keywords.  For instance, if you sell kites on your website, you could say: The largest collection of kites including butterfly kites, animal kites, and 3 dimensional kites.  What you don’t want to say is:  Kites, Kite, Walmart kites, Target kites and more can be found on our kite site.  By using these keywords in your description, you will only be hurting your SEO efforts, not helping them at all.

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Are you looking for that perfect secret formula that the people who hold those top spots on the search engines use?  Well I’m going to give it to you today so that you can start writing your content in this way to get you to the top of the list.  Of course when used in combination with off site SEO this can really help you get traffic to your site.

Most people concentrate on more than one set of keywords per page, which is fine, but you will need to define your main keyword before starting to write your content and then put your other phrases in order after that making sure you are only concentrating on 3 at the most.  So lets say your main keyword is labeled A and the next two are labeled B and C.

You want to have A located in the very first sentence of your content to get the most attention from the search engines.  The closer to the beginning the better.  Now continue on with your first paragraph and make sure you use keywords B and C before starting your next paragraph.

Now in the second paragraph, place keyword A in the first sentence and then continue on naturally.  In the third paragraph use keyword B naturally in your text.  Paragraph 4 should include keyword C somewhere in it before moving on.

In the next few paragraphs use your keywords (A, B, and C) naturally and no more than 2-3 times each before getting to the closing lines of your article. Try to make at least 4 more paragraphs to use your keywords in, and the search engines love lots of content so the more paragraphs the better.

In your last paragraph, it gets a little tricky but nothing you can’t handle, you’ve already gotten this far, you can do it!  This time we are going to use keyword C in the first sentence followed by keyword B and then keyword A should be as close to the end of your closing lines as possible.

Using this method will allow you to get the most out of your keywords in each article you write, giving you the proper keyword density.  Remember the more content you have the better and the easier it is to use the keywords you are targeting.

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In my time doing SEO, I’ve come across many characters who believe they’ve got the basics of SEO down and one of the greatest advice these people hear is ANCHOR TEXT, put your link under anchor text to help you rank higher for those words in the search engines- that’s pretty basic info you think how could someone mess that up right? WRONG! Now I’ve had clients with keywords like handbags,shoes, purses and watches all in one link which begs the question- Does anyone actually search for that except you? Who in thier right mind goes to google and types in handbags, shoes,purses and watches and then heads over to the keyboard and presses ENTER- that’s right noone.

Basic lesson- This is a sentence- Handbags,purses, lipstick, bags,bentley, shoes and watches.
This is a keyword- Handbags or Gucci Handbags maybe even Brown Gucci Handbags you know words that actual living human beings search for not aliens.

Lesson of the day- Before you start link building please for your sake and mine do keyword research, find out what people are truly searching for before you waste 10,000 links with the anchor text,bags,shoes,purses,lipstick,hotdog,fries,bentley and watches.

Why is Keyword Research so important?
If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, your customers may never find you, resulting in lost income and meaningless rankings, How many people spend 2 months building great links for some words that noone actually searches for, they get to the top of the search engine and can’t understand why their traffic levels haven’t improved. With keyword tools so readily available, there should be no reason why anyone should be in competition crazy keywords but everyday people are fighting each other off to get to the top of some crazy keywords that only they would search for.

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Today, we are going to talk about how you can get Google, inc. to help you with keyword optimization at absolutely no cost. Part 1 was on now to define the best keywords but the Part 2 is going to be a real revelation as you are going to learn how you can get Google to help you with that for free.

Please, follow this link in order to check Google’s cool service that allows you to learn the best keywords for your actual website. All you need to do is to type your current internet address into the “Enter a webpage URL to find keywords related to the content on the page.” field after checking the “Website content” radio button. Below, you are going to get a huge list of relevant keywords to choose from. You can form keyword groups or even define negative keywords. More tips for using this cool free service can be found here:

Use this tool a lot as it can give you even more ideas on keywords and keyword combinations you can use in your website content that you could have thought of. Having the information obtained utilizing this awesome tool you are much more acknowledged about the ways you can get your potential customers (users, readers) directed to your website, when they search for the information similar to that you have for them.

After you are done with defining the keywords, you can move on to the next significant set of activities – optimizing your website content, which is basically refining or rebuilding the current content as well as defining and setting up requirements for the new content that is being poured in on a regular basis.

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