I was surprised to yesterday when i logged-in to webmaster tools you know why? in the dashboard i saw some thing called "variants" in the keywords section.
I just explored it and it seems to be useful in-terms of keyword variations that we have in our website content and to an extent it is useful in the perspective of latent semantic indexing as well.When you click the keyword which was marked that has variants it was appeared like this (See the image below)
It shows the list of variations for that particular word say for example if you have a word balance in your site content here is how it goes balance, balanced balances, balancing Further it shows the list of pages on your website with this word.
With this you can identify whether have you targeted the right keyword variations in the right page or not.
It gives the opportunity to enhance and optimize the site content for the right page with the right keyword variations.
It also gives you an insight whether or not you have included the proper keyword variations for the given keyword singular, plural etc.
On latent semantic indexing (LSI) front you will know the keywords variations are contextually suits for the page or not.
Just check it out and tell me what else we can do with this new feature.
As you all know the famous proverb "Change is the only unchangeable fact in this world" and this proverb very well suits for Google that constantly changes its search algos and once again Google announced about their recent algo updates on its annual searchology event on May 12, 2009.
Further more this new Google algo supports RDF and Micoformats, as an search marketer it is an advantage for us to enhance our ranks in SERPs by using these standard formats in our web pages.
See this Google video for more information about new search options
You may ask me hey! So far you have explained in detail about the new features that's fine, but as a search marketer what is the take home message for me from SEO Stand point with these new features? Here come my insights on the updates,
New Google Algo update is further advanced and it must be giving more weightage on user's reviews/feedback than before. So, it would be good if we focus more on our "keywords and web page content" enhancements in a Thematic and Semantic way.
Also, we should be focusing more on Social Media optimization especially on the Ratings and Reviewing sites Eg: Cnetdownload, Stumble Upon among others. We should build strategies to improve upon our own forums to make it work towards our goals.
we should enhance and Improve our websites on Images and Image alt tags usage, by using more thematic and semantically relevant keywords in them.
We shall keep our additional efforts on Wikipedia and other niche social media sites towards building our online reputation.
Should work hand-in-hand with Developers to use Microformats and RDFs where ever applicable within our web pages to take advantage of Google's new algo update.
Content on the web page should be very precise and the most important content / web pages and datas should be presented to SEs in a structured format / embedded pages. For instance: Product specifications, Contact details, offers, Special discounts.
I believe the above points would be useful to increase our ranks in SERPs, please feel free to comment and include any new ideas and thoughts.
Mobile SEO has become a Buzz word across the search marketing industry. Search marketers and digital advertising agencies have started optimizing websites for mobiles , but the question arises, is the search pattern is same as Google web search ? if it is different , is there any keyword research tool that gives mobile search keywords ? i got the answer when i started a Mobile ads in Google adwords for one my client. Yes, Google gives mobile keyword research tool in their adwords interface also the Keyword patterns are entirely different from web search keywords.
I was really surprised when i saw the Keyword tool inside Google adwords that gives results tailored for mobile searches, immediately i went on to adwords help center and searched and its true that Google gives Mobile Search Keywords.
Here are the steps on how to access the tool from your adwords account ,just log in to your adwords account and create an adgroup inside a existing campaign specifically for mobile ads , even if you pause that adgroup the tool will still work , click on the keywords tab on the ad group
and you can find a keyword tool link which you can see below the date range, click that link ,then start searching by adding few keywords and you can see the keyword results, note that results are tailored to mobile searches
I found a lot of difference in keywords between mobile and web searches
You can see the difference in keyword search patterns on the above images between mobile and web search also, it shows the average search volume, CPC and ad positions. Google claims ,these information are gathered through their Google partner searches performed on cellular phones and other mobile devices. Am exploring this still and i am very happy to share this information with you all and i will keep you update on this, as and when i explore.
As you all know that Google has Started testing its new Adwords user interface, its been more than 2 months am using this Beta version and here is my insights on the new interface, well i would say the new interface is streamlined, more dynamic with whole lot of new features and it looks similar to Google analytics, which makes monitoring, reporting and creating campaigns and navigating entire account quickly and easily.
New Interface gives clear view of our Ads performance and other metrics in graphical representations that adds more aesthetic sense to the interface. Since i am running lot of placement targeted campaigns, i would say the "Network Tab in each campaign is the significant feature, that gives the entire list of networks where your campaigns or running on, along with the metrics including clicks, impressions, CTR, Avg CPC, Cost, Conversion, Cost per conversion and conversion Rate for each URL at one single place . Previously to know this data we need to undergo a hectic process of creating placement performance report.
More over the new interface gives option to sort the columns as per the metric of our choice, that really helps us to find out which sites are giving good traffic through content network also that gives us an insight of content network performance, not only that, you can add those sites automatically to your placement campaigns, which is now called as managed placements.
it is an very worthy effort from Adwords team is what i would say, as they have tried to integrate different areas of adwords interface in one single place that gives more flexibility to manage campaigns, adgroups and Keyword Bid management, unlike earlier interface we need not to navigate multiple pages or click different tabs to create campaigns, ads, keyword bidding etc., instead we have option to do everything in one single tab or page that saves lot of time, also it gives graphs to get quick over view of the performance of the segment being viewed
Finally to conclude, the new Adwords interface shows all the datas which is required to interpret and measure the campaigns success in a more neat and legible way that makes our work simpler.
Here is an one more Firefox extension SearchCloudlet it is an easy to use Firefox plug in which gives context oriented tag clouds on Google, Yahoo and Twitter interfaces, interesting isn't it.
It has an interesting features, that creates a Tag cloud on search engine interfaces based on the search term you type and you can see four tabs, that are Tags, Sites, Net and Off respectively as shown in the picture below.
When you click on "Tag you can see the tag cloud which not only tells you what the entire search result is all about, It also gives you list of keywords where you can easily narrow your search by clicking keywords on the cloud and adding them to your query, Its very simple!
Then you click "sites", it displays the most relevant sites that have information to your search query and some sites will be in bigger font which means it gives more relevant information about your search query. And go on to the next tab "Net", when you click that you will see domain extensions like .com, .in, .us and the extension which is in bigger font means that particular domain extension has more information on your relevant query.
This is a robust tool, could be very useful in terms of keywords research, also we can find the number of competing sites and their domain extensions, when you narrow down your search for your keyword terms on search engines
Why are you waiting still ?
just add on the plug in and start doing your keyword research today!
For More Information Visit http://www.getcloudlet.com/
Search Engine algorithms are becoming Intelligent and sophisticated, you know why i am saying this? now spiders can identify the duplicate pages in a domain using Canonical tags.
What is mean by canonical ? meaning as per the dictionary as follows
Appearing in a biblical canon "a canonical book of the Christian New Testament"
Of or relating to or required by canon law
Reduced to the simplest and most significant form possible without loss of generality "a canonical syllable pattern"
Conforming to orthodox or recognized rules "the drinking of cocktails was as canonical a rite as the mixing"
Canonical tags can be placed just like a no follow tag in a web page
It is a new way to inform search engine spiders about the duplicate URLs in your domain, earlier search marketers doesn't have option apart from 301 redirect and Robots.txt, now its become very easy for them to inform search engine spiders using canonical tag about the duplicate pages from websites and in my opinion this tags can be very much useful in conditions such as Dynamic Sites where the pages will create on the fly and the URLs having Session IDS
Now the question arises whether page rank and other link references of the page can be transferred and retained on the canonicalized page? and the answer is yes. Like 301 redirect, now canonical tags will also retain the page rank, back links and other credentials to the canonicalized page.
Major Search engines such as Yahoo, Google, MSN has already announced about this tags and how to use it judiciously on the web pages
I am expecting few more changes over the months to come and i would like to hear the feed back from the people those who have used this tag.
SEO has become more complex and sophisticated day by day and in order to sustain our rankings in search engines we are using lot of tools that analyze our competitors strategies, among the whole lot of tools available in online, SEO Toolbar is one such Competitive intelligence tool released by SEO Book as a Firefox add on. It gives all competitive datas at one single place and i feel the major part is the integration of their earlier tools such as SEO for Firefox , Rankchecker tool and keyword suggestion tool.
This tool bar pulls out various useful marketing datas that gives an holistic view of our competitive landscape among various search engines, this will helps us to evaluate how strong our competitors are and the highlight is, you will get all information at one single place that makes our SEO work Easier.
Following are the features of SEO Toolbar
Link information : It shows the number links for your domain and individual pages , information on unique linking domains such as .edu, .gov etc..
Directory information : Gives information on number of pages listed in Dmoz , Yahoo directory and Botw.
It also gives other competitive datas such as Age of the domain, page rank, traffic estimates and social media information from popular social book marking sites.
As an advanced feature it gives links to various other Competitive research tools as follows
Compete.com
Alexa.com
Google Trends for Websites
Quantcast
SEM Rush
Additional features :
IP address of the host
Search for sites on the same IP address
Whois data
Server header checker
User agent switcher
Highlight Nofollow Links
SEO X-ray
Ranch checker tool
Keyword research tool - Word tracker, Keyword discovery, Google keyword suggestion tool
I have downloaded it and I personally feel its an unique tool which would be very much helpful for our day to day work, So what are you waiting for, go head and download SEO Tool bar and simplify your work today!
