When I have been surfing the internet for the latest SEO news, I came across this unique list on how to rank in Twitter for a keyword entitled “5 Steps to Ranking #1 on Twitter“. But I’m wondering what does the author mean for ranking #1. Rank where? The Twitter directory? The search engine? or the top Twitter user list?

The author of the said article indicated five ways on how to ‘increase the ranking’ of a person. He cited the name, username, bio, account activity and number of followers. I agree with him that to be able to achieve maximum potential in Twitter, one must optimize a keyword in all these areas. But what he failed to point out is the different forms of search on Twitter.

Search on Twitter is not one-dimensional. It is not as direct as search engines. Twitter can be searched in various areas such as trends, hash tags, and directories. I think the author failed to point out in the area on which his tips will be more useful.

I also tried the effectiveness of Twitter in ranking in search engines. I have found out how personalities such as Britney Spears, TechCrunch and Kevin Rose have their Twitter profiles in the top 10 rankings when their name is searched.

I have also tried it on myself and yielded the same rankings.

With this, we can say that Twitter can contribute to ranking for certain brands. But how about keywords? I think this can be effective if you put keywords in your username or bio. With hashtag search, you will be associated with a particular term and you may build your credibility on a certain topic based on Twitter conversations. However, I have only tested the search engines on brand search and not on direct keyword search. As for directories, people can control the niche they are associated with because they can freely choose which categories should they belong to.

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We have been continuously tackling branding here at SEO tops. And we did for good reason. Even if we tried to deny it, branding is now evolving and may become the next ‘big thing’ in the upcoming years. We have seen Twitter expand and how brands have utilized social media for marketing. We have seen Google update its algorithm with the new focus on branding. We have also heard news from major networks that online television and radio advertising will take its toll in the next months. But what is branding anyway?

Branding is not the name nor is it the logo. It is the very essence of the company’s products and services. It stirs emotions, perceptions and impressions. It creates a perspective and triggers the imagination of its target audience. It is way more than having the right domain name or the right image. It is the shared meanings and associations people create with the brand.

As Martin Lindstrom, the author of “Buyology:The Truth and Lies about Why We Buy” said.

Effective branding leverages emotion, interaction, experience, desire, ritual, faith, and our senses (the more the better). The brain scan results from study after study showed that subjects’ brains reacted to strong brands the same way they react to emotional or even spiritual experiences.

So branding is so much more. It is not enough that you get your name out there. You must tell the people what your company stands for and how your products and services will affect their lives. Of course, since you are not perfect, you will not be able to please all. But if you instilled in their minds that you can please them, they will be convinced by that and believe it.

But what does branding have to do with search? As Lance Loveday said in his post in Search Engine Land entitled “Search:Too Boring for Branding“, search is just way too different from branding. He illustrated this through a commercial of Starburst which he saw on television.

It was easy to imagine being the funny-looking guy, chewing the candy yourself (touch), savoring the flavor (taste) and inhaling the aroma (smell) with your llama-esque nose.

But on search, everything is different. All one gets is this advertisement written in plain text. No emotions, no images. Although search have been proven by some people to contribute to the power of branding, it merely strengthens and does not establish the brand. The brand is only established after the click. As Lance Loveday puts it,

It’s what you do “after the click” that really counts

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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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This New Year, Yahoo brings something special for their readers and users. A team member from Yahoo has come up with a new category of search engine which is specially designed for the purpose of searching news. This was mainly intended at bringing a new innovation in the search world.

This is expected to bring more recent and latest news for the users of Yahoo. The earlier search engine of Yahoo will post news on the basis of the time when it as posted. This is done by stacking the news in a timely manner and displaying according to the latest news. The new search engine overcome all the difficulties due to this and comes up with a new method by which the old news could be updated at any time.

The TweetNews, as this is called will bring matching updates from Twitter tweets and other relevant news from Yahoo news. This will be combined and displayed to the users. This will act as a unique and attractive platform for both Twitter as well as BOSS. This can also act as a ranking signal and can be used to check and confirm the freshness of the news. This is expected to hit the market with great expectations.

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Google has recently declared that they are committed to Network neutrality. They have announced that, their search results will never be biased towards the source, ownership or the destination of the content in the web pages.
Broadband providers are asked not to allow the traffic to be directed on the basis of any of the above. They should be allowed to upgrade their network including edge caching, but they should never be allowed to prioritize the results displayed to the users.

Google is a supporter of various methods to enhance the web performance. This includes edge caching which will store the data in a temporarily manner. However, Google doesn’t consider this as a violation of their network neutrality concept.

Google has made it clear that, they don’t have any opposition towards the collocation or caching policies of the broadband providers. None of the agreements made by Google for collocation wants it that the traffic from Google search engine needs to be prioritized over other search engine results. Google warns that, the policies followed by the broadband providers should not affect the open internet or the innovation of the internet in a positive manner. This is why Google is committed to the neutrality of network.

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Yes guys well today was the day that I had to do my first ever slating post. Yes I am an SEO (and a very good one) I work with some of the industries finest. But my decision to right this post has nothing to do with any SEOs but instead to do with the shambolic people that have recently banned my account. Read on for this interesting development.

If you are a regular reader of my blog you will notice that I did a post a few weeks back explaining that Sphinn has become a one man show. The blog post upset a lot of so called SEO’s, well after reading through some of the comments these people stated that the people that get front page stories, get in there first and submit stories from the big sites such as Search engine land etc, Ok I knew this anyway but to be honest I didnt ever use Sphinn that much (As I am not a big fan of Sphinn, even more so now).

So today I decided let me test the waters and see how easy it is to get to the front page. I kept and eye on all the big boys blogs and if they posted anything interesting I submitted it to Sphinn. So towards the end of the day I could see that it was very easy to get early submissions as no one was really participating.

The stories were building up quite a lot of Sphinns, they were quality stories from all over and none related to my sites. Suddenly I go to log in to see how they were going and wham! Musa (This account has been terminated.)  http://sphinn.com/user/view/profile/Musa What the heck? I have just been banned for submitting great stories, which is the whole purpose of the site. Read on for the real reason.

After much consideration there are a few reasons why I have been banned

1) The big boys or as they like to think of themselves had some competition, I beat them to the pip and got the great stories in there before them. They therefore missed out on their coverage!

2) Just because most of them talk in conferences they think they are something big. Il tell you what come and see us both and see who can rank a site better. (Most of these so called speakers dont have a clue how to put there words into action) They can talk the talk but they are lost when it actually comes to ranking a site. I have seen this hundreds of times..

3) I do not live in the USA, We all know that the Americans do not like the British. But when it comes down to it you my try to hide us from social sites that you own and give leway to fellow citizens. But I again can probably outrank the lot.

4) Again people meet in the conferences and become friends, if they see someone better than them. Wham bham your banned.

There are plenty more reasons that I could list down all night, but when it comes down to it Sphinn is a shambles. Please remove the voting feature and just let the editors place stories onto the front page (Oh sorry thats what they are doing anyway!)

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Google has recently granted a patent where in they describe the method by which they manage to change the orders of the pages that are displayed to the users. This is mainly based on the language preference as well as the location of the searcher. 

According to this patent, Google will change the search results based on the country and the language preferred by the searcher. A recent patent in this context also consider the populations in which the searcher will be a part of. This will be based on the user behavior of the populations. This is through the analysis of pages which will be clicked by the members of those populations when a search result is being displayed to the users. 

Depending on this population, a ranking is given to the articles and the articles are displayed to the users based on that ranking. Algorithms and data associated with this population will be used when determining this population information from the web pages. 

When a searcher performs a search, the search engine retrieves the listing of pages according to the ranking. Once this is done, search engine will look for any population flag associated with the user. If this is found, the search engine will rearrange the pages according to that.

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So today I visited sphinn as usual, just to check on whats hot and whats not. I go to the Homepage and see this:

This is only a snippet, all together there were 8 stories from this guy (By the way nothing against the person in question) and to be honest in my opinion half of these do not deserve to be front page.

This is why user generated sites are getting such a bad name, I am writing this post to make Sphinn aware of this problem. I do not want to see news that I personally feel does not deserve to be on the homepage. Please do not turn into Digg!

Lets get some moderation and control going with the site, do not vote on the person (its not a talent competition!) vote on great search stories.

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Google has always been trying to get something different that makes browsing a different experience with their engine. A recent update from their side is the patent the company had obtained on universal search.

As per the new patent, visitors will be able to get search results coming from different categories. This includes various areas such as news, images, ads and web pages, when they type the word for searching. 

There are various advantages of this universal search concept. The most important one is the improved search experience felt by the searchers. They need not have to worry about obtaining results from various categories. 

Before the launch of this patent, users continued to use the default search results, without using the category tab provided by the search engine. This has always limited the chances provided by the company for the users. 

In this new concept, Google maintains different databases for various categories. When a query word comes, the engine searches for relevant information in each of the databases. This will be ranked. This rank is then used for comparison to know the relevance of the information. Finally the data will be shown back to the users. Through such an advanced indexing, users will be able to get details from the most relevant categories, rather than looking for this in the results displayed

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Here’s another exciting offer from the yahoo search marketing blog. This new feature allows Yahoo sponsored search advertisers to target advertisements based on individual zip code requirements. Apart from Ask.com, Yahoo is now the only other major search engine that has made specific zip code targeting for their advertisers a reality.

Google adwords even though not that specific does allow users to use zip codes for their targeted adwords and the search is limited to 20 miles around the targeted area. This allows advertisers find custom targets as per the zip code provided. This geo targeted feature can be used by simply altering your existing settings.  Yahoo sponsored search advertisers need to make changes under the campaign setting tab. In the target by field drop down box, you need select the zip/postal code option. After making your zip code selection, you’ll need to supply your list of zip codes and the search will process accordingly.

Yahoo does say that such targeting may not be altogether accurate based on many factors, including the level of targeting that’s been selected. However, there are many takers for this new feature, especially those that want to target specific areas rather than an entire city, so search results will be magnified within your target group of zip codes.

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