The Google+ Project : The Social Network Project From Google

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Google has announced its ambitious Social Media Project namely Google+ read as Google Plus. I have not yet got any hands on experience on it but from the blogosphere I guess Google has tried to stir up all the plus points of the existing successful social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Skype) and brewed Google+ to appeal to all and also made it mobile with an instant upload feature.

It has

+Circles: share what matters, with the people who matter most




+Sparks: strike up a conversation, about pretty much anything





+Hangouts: stop by and say hello, face-to-face-to-face





+Mobile: share what’s around, right now, without any hassle





+Huddle : Group Chat



Take a Quick Overview:

The Indian Social Media Landscape Is Changing Fast : Lets Review The Facts

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Image via Wikipedia

India Is Being Reborn:

Some Facts In The Video Below:

• India Has 134 MN TV Homes
• India Has 80 MN Internet Users
• 450 MN Mobile Users
• 240 MN Indians Experienced Internet On Their Phones in 2010
• Over 2 MN Accesses Social Media Sites
• This Number Is Expected To Grow 36 Times In The Next 3 Years
• Out Of 80 MN Indians Online 1/3 are  on Social Media Sites
• India Is The 5th Largest Country For Facebook
• India Will Be The 2nd Largest By 2012
• 20 MN Indians Look For Job openings Online Every Month
• Linkedin Has 9 MN Users In India
• Indian Consulting Firms Will Hire 35% Of Their Staff From Linkedin And Similar Sites
• Twitter Already Has More Than  9 MN Users  
• In The Next 6 Months 25000 Indians Intend To Join Twitter Each Day

View The Video For More Details:

The Purpose Behind Commenting On Blog Posts

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Image via Wikipedia

In continuation to our earlier blog post on The Art Of Commenting On Blogs we would like to share our perspective on the The Purpose Behind Commenting On Blogs.

The user generated content in the form of comments is something that every blogger looks forward to when a blog post is published. As this content is the indication that the post has been read by the visitor and the visitor has found it compelling enough to share his opinion about it.

The main purpose of sharing your views or opinion in the form of a comment is to voice your thoughts about the topic which will carry the discussion further and enrich the post with more knowledgeable information which you may be able to add because of your experience and knowledge about the subject matter.

Each value- added comment adds to the info. about the topic of the post and every reply takes the discussion further. It also indicates the popularity and readership of the blog to a great extent. This mode of interacting with the people in your niche industry and sharing knowledge has been the prevalent even before the people started using social media sites like face and twitter for sharing and interacting with each other.

Comments on the blog give an idea to the blogger about his style of writing and encourages the blogger as blogging is not only putting forward your opinion but also being open about listening to other people’s opinion all over the globe which may generate fresh perspectives and ideas about a certain topic by initiating conversations and discussions by way of comments and replies. This can be between the blogger and the readers or the readers amongst themselves.

Each valuable comment is a contribution and shows respect for the blogger as it proves that the visitor to your blog who may have reached the blog via whatever media, whether he is a new or a repeat visitor he has spent time in adding to the content and proving that he has read the post. Hence the metrics like the no. of comments on the blog, no. of visits (new and repeat – as more no. of repeat visits to the blog indicates that people want to come back to the site again to read more about what is the latest being shared by the blogger on his blog) are important in judging the popularity and acceptability of the blog in that niche industry .

But just like every coin has two sides, people instead of these objectives behind commenting are resorting to comment spamming just like we had the keyword spam and the link spam.

What is comment spam and how can the blogger help to avoid such a spam?

According to Google on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=81749

Comments are a great way for webmasters to build community and readership. Unfortunately, they're often abused by spammers and nogoodniks, many of whom use scripts or other software to generate and post spam.

If you've ever received a comment that looked like an advertisement or a random link to an unrelated site, then you've encountered comment spam.

Here are some ideas for reducing or preventing comment spam on your website.

· Turn on comment moderation

· Use "nofollow" tags

· Disallow hyperlinks in comments (Or have a Link Policy)

· Block comment pages using robots.txt or META tags

· Think twice about enabling a guestbook or comments

· Use a blacklist to prevent repetitive spamming attempts.

· Add a "report spam" feature to user profiles and friend invitations.

· Monitor your site for spammy pages.

Blogs are usually created for sharing , expressing and voicing certain thoughts, opinions and information to reach out to more and more people , comments on the blog prove that this exercise has been fruitful and has a multiplier effect on the outreach. Every valuable comment benefits the blogger and commentor but only if the true purpose of blogging and commenting is kept in mind while commenting.

Authorship markup And The rel Attribute

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Image via Wikipedia

Google early this month announced that they now support authorship markup—a way to connect authors with their content on the web.

Great quality content is written by experienced and knowledgeable authors and associating the content on the web written by them to their name is quite a logical thing to do. Some authors become synonymous to authority and reliable info. about the topics they write on and deserve the credit due to them on the web. Google now has a focus on fresh quality content on websites as a major factor with its Panda Update and this piece of micro data can help Google to sieve out the grain from the chaff easily .

Since Guest Blogging has also taken up in a very big way on the web, this Authorship Markup is surely a great help to all those who write extensively as Guest Bloggers on the web on various blogs. As this markup gives an identity to the author and acknowledges his/her work on the web.

This is a markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at a reputed blog has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with that blog author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.

Google Webmaster Central on
  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920 gives the following information :

To identify the author of an article or page, include a link to an author page on your domain and add rel="author" to that link, like this:

Written by Matt Cutts.

This tells search engines: "The linked person is an author of this linking page." The rel="author" link must point to an author page on the same site as the content page. For example, the page http://example.com/content/webmaster_tips could have a link to the author page at http://example.com/authors/mattcutts. Google uses a variety of algorithms to determine whether two URLs are part of the same site. For example, http://example.com/content, http://www.example.com/content, and http://news.example.com can all be considered as part of the same site, even though the hostnames are not identical.

If you have added the authorship markup you can check its validity on

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets



Related Links:

• Marking up contact and social networking information in the body of a web page helps Google better recognize and display your information in search results.

• What Is hCard Integration?

Understanding And Adapting To The Google Panda Update - A Simple, Systematic, Straight Forward Approach

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Image via Wikipedia

Google keeps on updating their search algorithms time and again in order to improve the quality of search results on a regular basis. Way back Google announced a PageRank technology to display quality search results as the webmasters were misusing the keyword tag extensively and there was a lot of black hat which was affecting the quality of results on the search engines.

Recently we have the Panda update which is a major update to the algorithm affecting the SERPs.


Google mentioned on its blogpost when they first announced (Feb. 24 2011)  the Panda Update 1.0 that “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.”

It also added “we’re very excited about this new ranking improvement because we believe it’s a big step in the right direction of helping people find ever higher quality in our results.”

On April 11th 2011 Google made this a global update and said Google's quality guidelines provide helpful information about how to improve your site.

In May 2011 and now in June 2011 Google has further updated and tweaked the algorithm for applying it more efficiently and reward site which follow the guidelines , are rich in quality content and are a source of valuable information for the user (searcher).

So far, the Panda schedule has been like this:

· Panda Update 1.0: Feb. 24, 2011

· Panda Update 2.0: April 11, 2011 (about 7 weeks later)

· Panda Update 2.1: May 10, 2011 (about 4 weeks later)

· Panda Update 2.2: June 16, 2011 (about 5 weeks later)

An Algorithm is a set of mathematical equations or rules that a search engine uses to rank the content contained within its index in response to a particular search query.

The Google Algorithm is the mathematical formula that Google uses to create the results (SERPS) when you do a Google search.

As Larry co-founder of Google said long ago, we want to give you back “exactly what you want.” On June 14th 2011 at the Inside Search Event Amit Singhal said that speed is something Google is obsessed about Google wants to make the search experience and browsing as smooth and as fast as like flipping a magazine and even avoid the delay of 5 secs. which usually is the case when a query is entered and the search results are displayed.

The Panda update is an effort to achieve both these objectives of quality search results and speed. The main focus is on quality content and the usability of the site for the user. Google wants to reward sites with quality content and are created with a focus on the user convenience of use and navigation.

So, the million dollar question is :

What Is Quality Content?

Google has even answered that on their blog by posing 23 questions for a site:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html


Point-wise And In A Precise Manner The Content Reflects High standards Of Quality If the content is :

1. Trust worthy

2. Written by an expert

3. Not duplicated with other variations on the same site

4. The site can be trusted for credit card payments

5. Does not have spelling and style errors

6. The topic is in sync with what the readers want to read about

7. Is original

8. Adds value to the topic

9. Checked for quality standards to provide good UX

10. Unbiased and give both sides of the story

11. Hosted on Domain Authority

12. Is not mass produced

13. Is edited well

14. Trust worthiness related to important matters like health

15. Reflects brand authority

16. Is complete and offers an overall view about the topic

17. Stating facts or discussing the topic with insights

18. Is it worth sharing

19. Having a lot of Ads. Loses the true essence of information and knowledge

20. Is the content worth being printed

21. Is it long enough to be informative

22. Is attention given to detail

23. Is published with good UX

Read More on: http://blog.webpro.in/2011/05/quality-content-site-guidelines-and.html

If your site meets the above requirements, does not have the violation factors as mentioned on the SEO Periodic Table , has a good download speed and ensures a good UX (User Experience) then your site is well adapted to the new Panda Update.

Hence, instead of hastily modifying the on-page factors : Focus on :

· developing quality content

· sharing more valuable information with your visitors

· improving the technical factors (Page Download Speed , Internal Architecture And Navigation, Bounce Rate , Engagement of the visitors on the site ,Time On Site) of your site.

If your site helps Google achieve its objectives of 'QUALITY SEARCH RESULTS' then  the Google Algorithm helps your site achieve its objectives of SERPs and Search Visibility.

Major SEO Factors Influencing The Search Engine Rankings And Web Visibility

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Google says that there are more than 200 ranking factors varying in degree of  importance. Some of the most important SEO factors which we focus upon and which we think are quite influential for SEO results are as follows:

On Page Factors

The on-page optimization ensures that the content of the page which the user can view is indexed by the search engines too. Due to proper indexing the site gets associated with that content in such a way that it can get ranked high for the search queries targeting the content of that site.

• Meta Data:

Metadata is information about data.The tag provides metadata about the HTML document. Metadata does not get displayed on the page, but is machine parsable. The tag always goes inside the head element.

• Title Tag : 

According to the W3C:

‘The TITLE element is not considered part of the flow of text.
       It should be displayed, for example as the page header or
       window title. Exactly one title is required per document.’

From the user perspective it should give an idea about the content on that page and from the search engines perspective it is the most important piece of meta tag in the head section.

The title tag gets displayed in the visitors browser and also is displayed in the search results. The directory editors and people who link to you also use the titles and it also gets saved when a visitor adds it to its favorites.

The ideal length of the title should not exceed 70 charaters and should have the most important keywords in the beginning of the title.

• Description Tag: 

The meta description is a brief summary of the content on the page. Again this tag is also useful from the user perspective and from the search engine perspective. The search engine displays the content of this tag in the search results after the title and the content thus displayed influences the searcher to click or not to click the search result. Hence the CTR (Click Thru rate) Is to a large extent depends on the way a title tag and description tags are framed.

Ideally the length of the tag should be upto 170 characters and should have the keywords targeted for that page in the content . Again the keyword prominence and keyword priority are very important factors to keep in mind while working on the content of the description tag.

• Header Tags 

Header Tags H1, H2, H3 should be used in the HTML code. That is an additional logical piece of content which can be Keyword rich as per the content of that para and also mark the content as main paras and sub paras with appropriate headings (H1) and sub headings (H2).

• Image Alt Text (Logo, Banners, Other Images) 

Images speak louder than words but that is for the user , the search engine bot can hear what is being said via images only if you have added the appropriate Alt Text to it which describes the image and adds valuable content to the page via images. The image names should also describe the image in a short precise manner.

Google and Bing both have image search hence if the image URLs rank in image search option of the search engine it becomes an additional route for targeted traffic in addition to the quality content which the bot indexes which is the text for the image. The image source should be embedded in the HTML and not in the CSS.

• Content (Static , As per User Preference and User generated) 

Everyone has heard this “CONTENT IS KING” , Quality content is what is important from the SEO perspective.

But what is quality content?

Content that is relevant and gives information about what the page is all about is considered as quality content. Relevance and writing from the user perspective is more important than focusing on keywords . This content can be static, dynamic or user-generated. The only thing you have to be sure about is that this content can be indexed by search engines.

• Navigation Menu Bar 

The navigation menu bar includes the links to all the other pages on the site hence this is one way to give the info. about the URLs on your site to the search engines besides the sitemap.xml file that you upload. Ideally there should be a link to all the other pages from each and every page and the links should be text links with ordered lists used for drop down menus rather than javascript.(Flash is a strict NO-NO)

• Footer 

The footer is the last piece of content that the search engine bot will read. Ideally the most important links to the site which the user would like to access once he has reached the end of the page should be put in the footer and ofcourse the links to social media accounts and preferably the address too on each page. (PLEASE DO NOT STUFF THE FOOTER WITH KEYWORDS. THAT IS A VERY CHEAP SEO TACTIC)

• Links to Social Media Accounts

Since search and Social Media have got integrated the need to give details about your social presence on the social media sites like facebook, twitter, youtube,etc . is a must as links from these accounts to your site and links from your site to these accounts sort of prove the authenticity and the ownership of the accounts.

Moreover, I suggest to open accounts on trunk.ly , klout.com, peerindex.net and other such sites which measure the influence of your social presence, associate your account to your niche industry and also keep a record of links shared by you giving a certain online persona to your social presence.

All the data collected by these sites allocate the authority and trust to your social media accounts and thereby the domains linked with these accounts on the basis of correlation.

• Contact Page and the About us Page 

Local search has never been more important as it is now. Your contact page should have the address , telephone nos , Fax Nos, Email ids and all other contact details preferably in a hCard microformat if you want to get the benefit of local search. Secondly if you have a presence in more than one country then you can have more than one hCard with different ids. So as to get search presence on more than one country specific domain of Google.

The About us page gives information about your company and should rank for the brand search so try correlating the importance of this page to establishing a brand identity. This page should have the details about the team and the mission, vision and values of the company.

• SEO Friendly URLs 

SEO friendly URLs mean that the URL itself should denote in 2-3 words what the page is about . For e.g www.yourdomainame.com/category/product-name.html this gives an idea to the user and also the keywords associated with that page get some additional boost. Usually all CMS offer this option.

Off Page Factors

Once you have taken care of the on-page factors , off-page factors are all about the factors which determine your popularity, social influence, authority, trust and thereby allocate a certain online reputation to your online presence.

• Inbound Links 

The inbound links determine your popularity but again the quality , topical and authority links give add more value than the quantity of links. Its better to have 5 good quality relevant links rather than 5000 irrelevant , non-related links.

We have written about our views on Link Building On Our Previous blogposts :
http://blog.webpro.in/2010/06/pagerank-obsession-patience.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2011/03/how-to-re-engineer-existing-inbound.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2010/05/inbound-links-and-seo.html

We are of the opinion that links should get built as a part of the web journey of the site but if by putting focused efforts you get authority links then more the merrier.

• Social Presence (Trust And Authority) 

According to Wikipedia:

Social media are media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media use web-based technologies to transform and broadcast media monologues into social media dialogues. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM). A common thread running through all definitions of social media is a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value.

Hence social media sites offer a two way conversational platform which offers a fair opportunity to voice opinions and feedbacks to both the parties involved .

There are many social media sites but Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and Blogs are widely used by the netizens. These sites are a good tool for effective online marketing and networking.

Your social presence is your voice on the web. SEO is what you say about yourself social media combined voice is what people say about you and when they both are in sync. Your credibility is established.

Duane Forrester's (From Bing) View On Social And Search Integration. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smx-advanced-duane-forrester-from-bing-talks-social-schema-markup-and-honey-badger-whiteboard-friday

Technical Factors:

• Page Download Speed 
• Bounce Rate 
• Click Thru Rate (See Description Tag Above) 
• Engagement of the visitors on the site 
• Time On Site 

Apart from the direct on-page and off-page factors there are certain metrics which can be tracked to monitor the progress of the site and at the same time tell a lot about the technical excellence of your site which again impact the user behavior and also influence the search engines for rankings.

In their last Inside Search Event http://blog.webpro.in/2011/06/google-announces-instant-pages-search.html Google made it loud and clear that speed is something Google is obsessed about Google wants to make the search experience and browsing as smooth and as fast as like flipping a magazine and even avoid the delay of 5 secs. which usually is the case when a query is entered and the search results are displayed. Speed is a very crucial factor as the user experience depends on how fast a page get downloaded whether it is a desktop or a mobile device.


If the page downloads fast > people tend to view more no. of pages > which means a low bounce rate > which also means more time on site > If the site has more engagement i.e if people are buying on the site, writing reviews or commenting on certain posts then they are showing interest for the content and it further denotes that it is a user friendly quality site.

All the factors mentioned above work together and in unison to influence the rankings. On-page optimization lays the foundation stone for the edifice , the off-page optimization influence the popularity and affect the stability and improvement of the rankings achieved and the technical factors influence the user behavior and thereby rankings in the long run.

All this cannot be achieved in a day. SEO is an ongoing process and the website needs to be further tweaked and tuned as per the changing algos. of the search engines in order to adapt the site to the changing scenarios so that it can withstand the algoquakes and maintain the visibility.

Related Links On Our Blog For Social Media:
http://blog.webpro.in/2011/02/integration-of-social-and-search.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2010/08/is-social-media-new-marketing-mantra-or.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2010/08/who-should-manage-social-media-in-your.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2010/12/right-approach-to-social-media-with.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2010/08/social-media-marketing-and-online.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2010/09/is-your-intenet-marketing-plan-creating.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2010/09/it-is-all-about-integratation-when-it.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2011/05/bing-incorporates-facebook-data-into.html

Google Announces Instant Pages, Search By Voice, Images At Inside Search Event

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Today Google announced the introduction to Instant Pages at the Inside Search Event held at San Francisco. Amit Singhal said that speed is something Google is obsessed about Google wants to make thethe search experience and browsing as smooth and as fast as like flipping a magazine and even avoid the delay of 5 secs. which usually is the case when a query is entered and the search results are displayed.

Google thinks that with Google Instant and Instant pages it should be able to achieve this considerably.Google on its official blog mentioned that “The Instant Pages feature is enabled by prerendering technology that we are building into Chrome and then is intelligently triggered by web search when we're very confident about which result is the best answer for the user's search.”


Know more about Instant Pages in the following video:



Google also announced the search by voice and image which they have extended to the desktops also.





Our Live Twitter Posts During The Event Can Be Read On http://twitter.com/#!/search/webprotech%20%2B%20insidesearch

Some Pictures Of The Event:

Google has always remained ahead in matters of search though this year has been remarkable for social but at this event only the developments regarding search were announced and discussed .

An Introduction To Schemas And Schema.org

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Earlier this month Google , Bing and Yahoo in the spirit of sitemaps.org had come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

  

Search engines have been supporting Microformats and dealing with structured markup individually as per their algorithms but as the search engines for quite some time now . The search engines had come to a consensus on the submission of the list of URLs of a site in the form of an XML file as per www.sitemaps.org Now they have agreed to follow certain norms on data which is stored in structured HTML as per www.schema.org

A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. The no. of websites are increasing exponentially and as the sites are more focused on optimization for search engines and having a web presence on majority of the search options like videos, images, news, discussions, etc. the content embedded in HTML is increasing and the need to correlate the content to relevant search options and make it more easily available to the user on search engines a common set of schemas will surely make the web and search experience more structured and systematic for the users and the search engines .

The schemas are a set of 'types', each associated with a set of properties. The types are arranged in a hierarchy.

Browse the full hierarchy for schemas:

· Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries ...

· Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject

· Event

· Organization

· Person

· Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant ...

· Product, Offer, AggregateOffer

· Review, AggregateRating

http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html

From the SEO perspective according to me these kind of collaborative efforts by search engines ensure the indexing as per more accurate relevance and correlation for search results and branding. I think this step of unitedly working on data formats for structured HTML will make the web experience qualitatively and quantitatively richer for the user and the search engines.

Related Links Where You Can Read More About schemas and Microformats:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-schemaorg-search-engines.html

http://schema.org/

http://schema.org/docs/faq.html

http://blog.webpro.in/2010/05/what-is-hcard-integration.html

http://www.microformats.org/wiki/hcard

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html

http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/search/archive/2011/06/02/bing-google-and-yahoo-unite-to-build-the-web-of-objects.aspx

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smx-advanced-duane-forrester-from-bing-talks-social-schema-markup-and-honey-badger-whiteboard-friday

#SMX Advanced Seattle (8th June 2011) Day 2 (A Curated Resource)

Author : Bharati Ahuja

The details , discussions and the slides shared on Day 2 can be found on the following links:

 SMX Advanced Seattle Agenda – June 8, 2011

http://searchmarketingexpo.com/advanced/2011/full_agenda2  

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SMX Advanced Liveblog: Social Data & Search With Bing’s Stefan Weitz

Day two of our SMX Advanced conference is set to begin shortly with a keynote session on the “Confluence of Social Data & Search.” Bing Director Stefan Weitz is due to give a presentation/demo and then chat with Danny Sullivan.

Read more on the following link:

 http://searchengineland.com/smx-advanced-liveblog-social-data-search-with-bings-stefan-weitz-80698 

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• Keynote: Confluence of Social Data & Search
• Google Survivor Tips
• Hardcore Local SEO Tactics 
• Leveraging SEO Power Tools

Read more on the following link:

http://outspokenmedia.com/blog/

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Bing’s “Honey Badger” – An Upgrade To Webmaster Too

This morning at our SMX Advanced conference, Bing’s Stefan Weitz announced “Honey Badger” — Bing’s latest upgrade to its Webmaster Tools.

Read more on the following link:

http://searchengineland.com/bings-honey-badger-an-upgrade-to-webmaster-tools-80738

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Hashtag for the show is #smx catch up with the trending topic for the SEO industry onhttp://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23smx or you can follow @smx

The Happenings And Discussions At #SMX Advanced Seattle On Day 1 - ( 7th June 2011 - A Curated Resource)

Author : Bharati Ahuja

I am sure every SEO and Internet Marketing Person would have loved to be at Seattle on the 7th of June 2011 to attend the SMX Advanced and catch up with what is the latest in the search industry. Atleast I was and hoping to be there next year or hoping SMX Advanced to select one of the cities of India as the venue.

Thanks to all the live blogging and Twitter by which we can keep ourselves virtually present at the event.

The details , discussions and the slides shared on Day 1 can be found on the following links:

 SMX Advanced Seattle Agenda – June 7, 2011

http://searchmarketingexpo.com/advanced/2011/full_agenda

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On Tuesday morning, SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin presented evidence at our SMX Advanced conference that there’s a high correlation between Facebook Shares and ranking well on search engines. In afternoon, the head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts said that Google doesn’t see Facebook Share data at all. An SEO-search engine catfight? No, both actually agree.

 The Bing Party SMX Advanced  Seattle 2011

Read more on the following link:

http://searchengineland.com/its-not-he-said-she-said-over-google-rankings-facebook-shares-80601

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Day one of our SMX Advanced conference is wrapping up with a late afternoon tradition: Danny Sullivan’s “You & A” conversation with Google’s top spam cop, Matt Cutts. The session is due to start at 5:00 pm PST but, just between us, it’s bit hectic up front and gut feeling is that we’ll be a little late. (In other words, the Cuttlets are already out in force and Matt is being mobbed.)

Read more on the following link:

http://searchengineland.com/smx-advanced-liveblog-you-a-keynote-with-googles-matt-cutts-80576

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It’s the first session of the show so Danny spends some time going over the housekeeping stuff. He explains how people are supposed to tweet the sessions, how it would costs eight gazillion dollars to outfit the entire room with power strips and lots of other housekeeping stuff. You’re not here so that stuff probably doesn’t concern you. Luckily for you it’s time to get to the search stuff. 

Read more on the following link:

http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/seo-periodic-table/

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How hard can a panel called “The Really Complicated Technical SEO Infrastructure Issues” be to liveblog, right? It’s not like the panel is full of totally smart people who can think rings around the rest of us or anything… 

Read more on the following link:

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/06/the-really-complicated-technical-seo-infrastructure-issues-smx-advanced/

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Links To The Slide Decks by @jennita and @randfish of @seomoz :


http://www.slideshare.net/jennifersablelopez/the-social-mind-vs-the-seo-mind

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/interesting-data-from-the-2011-ranking-factors

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Matt Cutts Has The Panda With Him  SMX Advanced Seattle 2011 - Hey! Don't  Miss The Shoes...

Hashtag for the show is #smx catch up with the trending topic for the SEO industry on http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23smx or you can follow @smx

The Importance Of Your Twitter Bio

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Image by xotoko via Flickr

Twitter is a micro blogging platform and offers very limited real estate to mention the details about yourself or your company. Just as the Title and the Description tags on your web page give an introduction to what your page is all about. The Twitter bio can help you to connect with people if your bio is well worded and describes your company or gives info. about you in a precise manner.

Twitter offers 160 characters for the bio description in the profile section. According to me this is the most vital content with which people connect to if they come across your twitter profile besides your avatar, which again establishes your identity.

According to me the following aspects should be mentioned in the bio giving an overall idea to the user and also help the bot in indexing data about the account correlating it with location, industry, product and website in 160 characters.

· Specify the product or service your company offers and caters to which industry

· The Tagline of your company to identify with if any

· Specify Location if you want to connect to local people

· Links to your site and blog

For e.g

@Webprotech Ahmedabad India
WebPro Technologies is located in Ahmedabad in Gujarat in India and offers Web and SEO Solutions and SEO Training http://www.webpro.in http://blog.webpro.in
SE Roundtable

@seroundtable  
The Pulse of the Search Marketing Communityhttp://www.seroundtable.com/

Darren Rowse @problogger view full profile →
Melbourne, Australia
I blog about twitter and tweet about blogging. Sometimes I blog about tweeting about blogging and tweet about blogging about twitter.http://www.problogger.net/about-darren-rowse-problogger/

Search Engine Land @sengineland view full profile →

Everywhere search is
Follow us for news about Google, Bing, Yahoo, search marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC) & how to use search engines better!http://selnd.com/sengineland

Wasim Ismail @wasimalrayes view full profile →
England
Internet Marketer | Web Entrepreneur | Online Business Expert http://alrayeswebsolutions.comfor setting up a successful online business & valuable web presencehttp://www.wasimismail.com/profile/

barkha dutt @BDUTT view full profile →
India
News addict. Editor, Anchor-Journalist at NDTV. Wannabe Lawyer. Voracious reader.

SEOmoz @SEOmoz Seattle, Washington
The Web's Best SEO Software, Tools, Resources and Community.
http://www.seomoz.org/

Ann Smarty  @seosmarty
Love to guest blog? Looking for guest bloggers? Check out MyBlogGuest.com
http://myblogguest.com/

These are just some examples and have each account has a different connect factor in each bio but again as every individual is different every bio will be unique but has a lot of potential in establishing your brand online.

This content further is one of the quality content parameter indexed by search engines , reputation monitoring sites and softwares and sites which are indexing links being shared on Twitter , for e.g www.trunk.ly .

So wherever your twitter account link is being saved or displayed the content in your twitter bio and avatar also travels with it as it becomes your identity in text and image form.

You can see on the following links how the twitter bio gets displayed and tracked on other sites :

http://trunk.ly/Webprotech/

http://beta.klout.com/#/Webprotech

http://www.peerindex.net/webprotech

http://twittergrader.com/webprotech

Hence, it cannot be taken lightly. It has to be worded properly portraying the right identity and making the account get associated with the right industry or group of people which will aotomatically offer the right relevance factor when the content will be indexed by the search engine bots.

Carry the discussion forward by sharing your views below in the comments. 

SEO Periodic Table By @sengineland – A Valuable Resource.

Author : Bharati Ahuja

Image via Wikipedia

Chemists used the properties of elements to sort them into groups in a periodic table. The periodic table classifies scientific information like the various properties of the different chemical elements. Its main purpose is to compare, systematize and classify the behaviors of chemical elements. Specifically, it is widely used in chemistry. Apart from chemistry, it can be applied to other academic disciplines as well, such as chemical engineering, biology as well as physics.

Now @sengineland has applied it to the SEO ranking factors categorizing the ranking factors under the following heads.

• On The page SEO
• Off The Page SEO
• Violations
• Blocking

All these SEO factors work in conjunction influencing each other sometimes more positively and sometimes in a decrement order .

Such a scientific representation of the SEO Ranking Factors is a real rich resource for any SEO,. Especially when you discuss with the clients about these issues. Such resources and presentations add credibility and enhance the reputation of the industry.

The SEO Periodic Table at a glance proves that SEO is a science and sums up the most important aspects SEO in one image but the real challenge lies in the implementation of all these SEO elements in proper proportion at the right time which is an art backed by knowledge gained through experience.