Imthiaz Blog

I was reading quite interesting article about black hat SEO and white hat SEO. These are different techniques adopted in optimizing a website for search engine. Timboy has written an interesting article about `Search engine optimization (SEO) from black to white`.

Some good links regarding SEO hats

http://www.silverdisc.co.uk/articles/seohats/

http://seoblackhat.com/

This is a late news but a good one. Google has released pinging service for blogs. This service can be used to inform the latest updates happening in your blog. Worpress used pingomatic to inform all the blogs ping services. So by default all wordpress blogs see that the latest post are updated to blogs search engines.

If your blog is not listed in our results, we want to hear about it.

Enter your blog’s web or feed address below and we’ll do our best to add it to our index as quickly as possible.

- Google

I was shocked to see that Google has updated my last post. This is good :-D.

Google Blog Ping Service,Google Blog Search, About Google Blog Search Pinging Service, About Google Blog Search Pinging Service API… Happy blogging

I came across one interesting article at seo by the sea where it says Google has submitted 6 new patents for personalized search. You can say it as an intelligent search if you are not worried about your privacy. One part of the patent filings goes into detail on some possibilities. Here are some details of how a search might be modified by this personalization system: 

• A search query is received by the search engine which runs the query against the document repository.
• After the results are received, they are adjusted based upon information from the user’s history.
• Results that are present in a user’s history could be added to the results presented to the user.
• The order of the search results can be adjusted in accordance with a history score and/or any user-modified result score.
• Scores like the search result score and the history score can be combined and with search results is reordered displayed based on that combined score.
• A searcher may be shown an indication showing previously visited pages, including things like the date and time a page was previously visited and the number of times that the user has visited the site within a certain period of time.
• A certain number of the most highly ranked results that a searcher has previously visited could be displayed in a area above the search results, or in another section of the page, or even in a separate window.
• Those previously visited pages may be ordered based upon different ranking criteria, such as a history score, pagerank, time of last access, number of accesses, or others.
• In addition to previously visited pages, a user’s previous query sessions and/or session groups may also be shown along with the search results and ordered as described above.
• Search results which a searcher has seen in the page, and which have been clicked upon can be boosted higher in the set of search results.
• A user’s browsing activities can be considered in addition to, or in lieu of, past presentation and click through of particular search results. For example, if a location was previously visited by a user, it could have its score boosted, based upon the number of times the user has visited the location. So, a site that is bookmarked and visited frequently may rank higher than one which has been searched for and selected in search results.
• Search results that were previously presented to searchers but not clicked through could be demoted in the results.
• As an alternative, instead of reordering search results, a history score could be used to determining whether a result is shown with some type of visual indicator such as a change of color or through the use of highlighting.
• The order of some pages showing in search results could be boosted higher if the searcher has visited or clicked on results from related sites or pages.
• The amount of times that past queries have retrieved a certain set of results, and how long ago those happened, could also affect the placement of a document in search results.
• A searcher’s history could be used to identify additional search results. For example, results in a searcher’s history not appearing in a set of results but which were retrieved by similar queries could be added to the results. It’s possible that these might be displayed in a different area of the screen than the initially identified search results.
• Additional queries might be suggested, possibly even similar queries that were previously submitted by the user. The similarity of these additional queries might be calculated a number of ways, such as by edit distance, stemming operations, correction of obviously misspelled words, semantic mapping, similarity of the retrieved document sets, and others.
• Queries could also be suggested from the user’s history which were submitted immediately following or preceding the query at issue, in the same query sessions or session group from that history.
• Queries could be run from different document source repositories. For example, if a searcher runs a web search, and they’ve done a similar search for a product review, they may be given the option of running the query in a product review repository.

From the above points you can say every click and every mouse move on Google website is logged. In the future they will do like we have personalized the website template based on your search :-D. I think with the help of orkut.com they will get to know what kind of friends I have or try to get, my environment, my style, etc etc. Now they have bought youtube so more tracking for Google ;-). After watching the video `Cutting Edge 04-07-06 Google Behind The Screen` I have stopped using my gmail account and I am slowly moving away from it, as I am more worried about my privacy and me being monitored all the time :-(.

Google is updating its PageRank index :-). I have noticed a jump in my web page from 3 to 4 ;-). If anyone interested in checking whether your PageRank is increasing use this website.

http://livepr.raketforskning.com/

In that website they say Google has turned off live PageRank and it is returning 0 for all pages queried. After reading that I check my old code on PageRank in php. And it was returning zero :-(. So Google is up to something this time or they don’t other people to misguide or misuse people in the name of live PageRank etc etc…

What are the importance steps we have to do in order to optimize a single page in a website? Do we have to optimize only the homepage or all the pages of the website? How can we focus on particular keyword for the website? Wow that’s lot of question to be answered. There are so many questions that will arise when you really start doing SEO for a website.

The important steps that has be considered serious in optimizing a webpage are

• Proper title for the page in the header section
• Page title again in the body of the page with header tags h1,h2 etc
• The body of the page should have rich content based on the title of the page.

I think so the above points are the basic stuff that has to be followed while doing any decent website. It is always better to have all the pages in the website optimized. No SEOs has ever optimized all the keywords he wants to target in homepage of the website. In-fact it not a good practice to do that and it is not possible. Distribute your keywords to be focused in different pages and concentrate it better.

I know you think I am really mad!!! Now what is search engine spider bots? What does it do? Who sends them? Why they send them? What is benefit of spider bots visiting a website? How often do these bots visit a website? What are the parameters that control the frequency of the visit? Will more visit by these bots benefit the website or vice versa?

Search engine spiders are software designed to get the webpage and save them to the search engine database. These are sent by the search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo etc. They send these bots to retrieve the information present in your website and save the same in their database for them search and give results. The benefit of bots visiting your website will be your site will be included while search engine performing a search. And chances are there for your website to appear in the search. One cannot really predict how often these bots comes to the website. For some it comes every few minutes for some it may takes months. The parameter that controls the frequency of the bots visiting your site will be based on the fresh content, site popularity, etc. It is good if the bots comes more often to the website. It means your website is given more importance and search engine will always keeps your site index up to date.

All spiders/robots obey one thing called robots.txt. Please read this if you wish to know more about how to write your own robots.txt file. Sorry I can really feel that I am jumping like monkey here and there. I am not good at writing anyway..!! More to come…

What is wrong with me? why did I choose the title of the page as search engine optimization Dubai? Oh in my previous post I have told I will be writing something about search engine optimization. Yes let me start something about it ;-). I am not sure how it might work for others, let me just share what worked out for me.

Wow..!! That’s a lot of search engine out there. If you see the picture above the search engines are placed by popularity and by use. In the center you can see the most outstanding player in search engine market Google. Next Yahoo, MSN, Dmoz and so on. Its is not that the other search engines listed in outer circle are bad, but those are not used by the users compared to others.

Okay let me come to point. What is search engine optimization?. It is nothing but set of techniques used by the webmaster over a website to improve the ranking in search results. The person who is doing this is called SEOs. There are lot of benefits in optimizing a website for search engine like good publicity, new visitor and good business. Trust me some online companies forgot how normal online business work and they just relay on optimizing the website for search engine. Few of them are successful and most of them are not.

Some of the most common words used in SEO

• Keywords - the search terms you would like to concentrate on
• PageRank - popularity of your website among other website
• Ranking - the position of search result for a particular keyword

I think with these basic information we can start off. I will discuss more in detail in my next article…!! Till then have fun!!!