SEOTops

It is generally heard that when the number of pages hold by the search engines increases, the chances that they cant provide the best results for the customers are high. It means that, as the log with the search engines increases, the best pages obtained in exchange of the queries will be less in number.

The uncertainty involved in the chances of losing the amount of information content missed by a person looking for results are known by the term entropy. The entropy involved in the search performed by search engines is not that high as we imagine. The search engines can well predict the information and the pages which are more relevant to the person who is making the search.

Since most of the search engines gain more information through the personalization, the entropy is decreased even further. This will make the work of search engines even easier while making a query for the word entered by the user. If there is not much information about the interests of the person making search, they will take personal data like the membership of the individual to understand the kind of information he will be looking for. Location information through IP address is also used as a way to reduce the entropy.

You might have used singular and plural versions of the same word for querying in most popular search engines like Yahoo and Google. You might have wondered on whether these are returning the singular results of the plural ones when you give a word for query or whether they are returning back with same options.

Returning results with singular and plural ones can be a little confusing as whether you will get the best results and the results you are looking for. The search engines should well explore both the categories and should bring a mix of the singular and plural results.

The most popular search engines are looking for both singular and plural versions of a word while you query for it.  The results will be different when you give the word in a quotation mark. Hence the exact results and the find all results will be quite different. The search engines like Yahoo had devised methods which will handle both singular and plural words and will try to make conversions from one form to another and try to reduce the overhead taken by the search engines to return such results. They try to provide the most relevant results in such queries.

Search engines rank web pages from among a great collection of pages and this is an automated process. It never means that, search engines are not giving importance to people while showing the relevant results of a particular search. Some people will be satisfied with the way the search engines are coming back with results for their query. At times, some people might feel that the result is not relevant to their query.

Instead of using quality reviewers for a fully automated search, Yahoo uses the information they collect from the behavior of the users. They try to learn how the searchers are using the pages they obtain from queries. When specific query results are displayed to the users, they tend to choose some and this information is compared by Yahoo. In this simple manner, they will be able to make use of the knowledge and interest of the users while they rank the pages for query results.

Such a ranking will even include the knowledge and education level of the people who are making queries. When the ranking of the user is used by search engines, this influences the rating of the search results as well. The quality of the reviews has a great influence on this type of ranking. 

When search engines grow and expand with technology, the search engine optimization techniques also grow. So any updated information from the field of SEO marketing has high relevance. It happens quite often that when you search for something, you received information that is not relevant. So people will have to refine their queries.  

So it is better if the search engines can expand a query based on the popularity ranking of the query. This system will be based on the behavior of the people while they use the search engines. users’ behavior in determining actions including clicking pages to get better results have a great role in this kind of popularity ranking for query expansion. Users also use different query refinement methods to get a suitable result for their query.  

Search engines can expand the query in a way that people will get interest in the new search engine result even if it is not directly related to the query words they used for searching. So when this kind of result is accepted by people, search engines can blend both of the queries in future. The acceptance for the blended result will be more from the part of the people. This will reduce the number of people leaving the search engines unsatisfied.

GenieKnows is a search engine that has been in existence since 1999, slugging it out in the lower tiers of the search engine universe. One of a dying breed of independent search engines, it adopted a radical and somewhat dangerous plan 18 months ago. In an effort to give itself a unique identity that would make it stand out amidst its competition and appeal to its search-user market, GenieKnows went vertical, separating its offerings into three categories: Local, Gaming and Health. This effectively created three distinct search engines, each with its own unique functionality and characteristics. Company sources revealed the intention to introduce more such verticals in the coming months.

Mark Harper, VP of strategic relations at GenieKnows credits Founder cum CEO, Barbara Manning, with the decision to serve specific verticals instead of generic search results. This decision came two years ago, a time when smaller players were struggling to survive in a search engine market so convincingly dominated by a few extremely big players. Many were forced to close, unable to compete with those six giggly and colorful letters, Google.

Having already amassed a large base index of web pages using their own home grown algorithmic search engine and their ever-awake crawler christened GenieBot, GenieKnows decided to abandon the futile general search engine battle with Google and serve local search results, health information and target the gaming community. These were smart moves, and each of these verticals is growing at a rapid pace today, each presenting its own distinct advertising and revenue generation opportunities.

GenieKnows’s Local Search, probably the most important vertical, lists nearly 20 million local businesses in partnership with Localeze, a business content management firm. This innovative local search engine combines search results with satellite or graphic images, breaking the map into a grid system called Zone Search, helping to find the right street or address easily. Much of the content in GenieKnows’s Game Search engine consists of game reviews and tips, cheat codes, hardware, maps etc. It also displays gaming forum discussions. And the third vertical GenieKnows Health Search provides health and wellness information. Spidering most major media websites as well as medical discussion forums, it provides thorough results.

With its Local Search well established and the other two verticals expanding rapidly and having survived what could have been the harshest period in the short history of search engines, GenieKnows is extremely well-positioned to make the most of the endless possibilities offered by what could be a brighter era for alternative search engines.

Every major search engine uses an automated approach for indexing the net and serving relevant content- that’s a given. But what hundreds of young upstarts are trying to do is look for innovative ways to include human input into the equation. Omgili offers an interesting and unique mix of automated approach and the human factor.

Omgili sends out an automated crawler to index the web like any other search engine would. But that’s where similarities end; Omgili goes a step further and tries to specialize its results. It scans millions of online discussion boards, forums and similar discussion-based resources from all over the world. To see the result of this in action, search for, say, a certain brand of digital camera on Google and Omgili. On top of Google’s result page, predictably, will be the manufacturer’s page for that product; But here’s the surprise, Omgili will fill your page with links to various online discussions about that particular camera, helping you find out what other real people thought about this product rather than give you the device’s specs.

This young search engine includes a number of nifty features aimed at increasing its usefulness as a search tool. Omgili Search Aid is a feature that lets a user search within the search queries performed by other users. Product Reviews is targeted exclusively at serving information from product review sites. Omgili Buzz displays the top topics at that point of time in various categories such as news, videos, movies etc… And yet another feature, Google@Omgili, empowers a user to do a simultaneous search on both search engines.

If you are interested in finding out about what other people are saying about topics that interest you, Omgili might be the tool you have been looking for. It is far from perfect, but it certainly shows the direction that the next generation of “Specialized” search engines must take.

If you thought there exists a search engine for every possible cause and reason, you thought wrong! TFTHostels.com is the web’s first exclusive hostel search portal. This search engine integrates the directories of every major hostel booking website, giving a one-stop solution to an online hostel-seeker for the first time ever and saving considerable time and money in the process. Services offered include:
Search the largest online directory of hostels anywhere in the world
Compare rates and specs, check availability and location
Check out reviews and recommendations
Zero in on the perfect choice and book your hostel online

This cool new search engine is in the beta stage and derives its horsepower from Travelers for Travelers. The service is currently free and does not charge additional fees to favor a certain hostel/booking service over another, according to the website. Marco Van De Kamp, the Head Honcho at TFTHostels, recommends combining his service’s capabilities with Twitter, Google Blog Search and Summize to get all the latest recommendations and reviews on the hostels that his service serves up.

And speaking of Google, it announced its Website Workout contest at the recently held SMX Seattle Conference. The idea behind the contest is to help four businesses to “pump up” their websites; to specifically generate more leads, sales or signups, whichever the case maybe. Enter the contest by answering a few simple questions on why exactly your website needs to be pumped up! The four chosen winners will benefit from the expertise of Google’s consultants who will put its Website Optimizer tool to work on identifying and testing the best combinations of page design, graphics layout and copy and other web page factors that will yield the best possible conversion rates for the site. Google is accepting entries through June 17, so get going!

Google’s Universal Search and other search engines’ blended search prefers different kinds of content that is a combination of news, images, PDF documents and video. A screen shot or even an immaculately drawn diagram or flow chart speaks volumes to aid written passages for any specified topic. These accompanying aids changes the scenario prompting better optimization, changes the equation for SEO as different kinds of content turn up in a blended search by the browsers. An article on suppose ‘Affiliate marketing’ can accompany a flow chart showing relationship and transaction between the Brand Seller, Affiliate and Customer. A topic on ‘Tubers of a Potato’ can depict images and even an video to describe the look and feel of a tuber. Hence if content on your website is totally based on text your website could be alloted a lower position in in the search engine results pages leading to fewer visitors resulting in dwindling of hit count.

Google and the other search engines have begun displaying blended results containing more than mere text for the ensuing search terms provided by the net browsers.. You can still perform specific searches for videos, images and blogs, however Google’s universal Search lets you to find them in general results as well. Hence your SEO strategy needs to keep pace with these changes to adapt to the circumstances for accomplishing the desired results of seeing your website at the top of the heap for relevant search terms. These kinds of results can turn up for just about anything now. Hence a search term can spurn up a variety of information reaching out to us through various forms of media like image results, text based articles, a link to a YouTube video and some precise flow diagrams to get the point across.

What do we seek to learn from this change in Google’s Universal search? It is becoming impossible to get in text-based results into a good position on Google, but they are definitely going to be pushed down the order to accommodate more informative websites with a variety of aids to their credit. Even if you have worked hard towards your good position, you now need to spend many hours creating not only good content utilizing SEO techniques to optimize your web site but also be on your toes to flexibly adapt to changing trends to retain your indomitable position. So, mix it up and mix it well and having a different approach is the key to it.

The unimaginably growing complexity of web design and its related activities have necessitated the proper usage of two files namely robots.txt and .htaccess.

To start from the beginning let us say that both the files can be created using any text editor such as notepad and both of them must be placed in the root folder of your web server which implies that whenever your are opening the file system of your host, these two files must be visible to you. Please note that some web servers prefer to keep the .htacces file hidden. BUT search engine crawlers and spiders can easily trace them.

Let us now try to define the individual purpose. Robots.txt basically controls the movement of the robots, sent by the search engines, inside the existing file system of your web server. So, if you want some prohibitions, you can mention it in robots.txt. You can even customize the robots.txt according to your needs. On the other hand .htaccess file primarily serves the purpose of URL redirection and module rewrite.

Let us take an example: while revamping your website, you want to omit some of your old pages, which had been already crawled by the search engines. Now, such sudden omissions of web pages, which have been already crawled, casts a tremendous negative impact and they treat it as unfounded tagging the infamous URL Not found. The best way is to redirect the old pages intelligently to the existing pages, so that crawlers don’t fall in a soup, instead they find a landing platform, wherein they also redirect the visitors.

Module Rewrite has gained importance when people have started noticing that search engines prefer user friendly URLs instead of automated URLs generated by several programs. This is worth mentioning that even popular software packages like PHPLd and WordPress also have kept provision for module rewritten URLs to earn you the additional advantage of generating Search Engine friendly URLs.

It is to be mentioned that the presence of either robots.txt or .htaccess is mandatory in your web server, but it gives you a complete control over the web server and moreover you can dictate the crawlers and spiders in your own way.

Just as any title by default shows the inner meaning of the content so also web pages have relevant titles. A web page containing a title ‘Professional web solutions provider’ implies that the page is going to talk about web solutions and associated fields. Along with the ages search engine crawlers and spiders have also started emphasizing on the title as a gateway to the content of that page.

Today there are several web tools to cross check the relevance of a title with its attached content as well as stipulations have been imposed by the browsers regarding the permissible width of a title. Hence, the title does not mean only the collection of asymmetric words or keywords rather the challenge is to make the title meaningful and attractive to the visitors as well as to the search engines remaining within the limited character length as stipulated by most of the common browsers.

Here comes the role of CMS or most reputed link directories or customized software which can automate the title without or with very little intervention of the site owner or webmaster. Most of the CMS packages acquire meaningful keywords or sentences to build up the titles unless exclusively mentioned otherwise. This is to be noted that CMS, link directory or customized software prefer to use the category name or the name of the post header/article in the title. Some of them also embed name of their own software in the title. The significant disadvantage of this method being the appearance of the software name in the title page dilutes one’s potential or dignity a bit. While on the other hand the advantage being the popularity of the software increases the chance of your page being touched upon by a wide gamut of visitors who prefer to search by the name of the software or associated keywords.

Usage of popular software as a web development tool has been found to work positively even in the eyes of the search engines. So why not give it a try?