This is an important piece of information for all members of KPMRS who are using our service to monitor their website rankings on Google because you may see a difference in the rankings shown on kpmrs.com from what you may see on your personal computer. Many members have already contacted us about this issue asking us the reason why we are showing wrong results. This post should make it clear that, our results are not wrong but they are just different because we do not take into effect your personal search history.

In order to see the global search results, you can simply turn off this feature from “Web History” which is shown on top right corner of Google.com. This will tell Google that you do not wish to customize the search results based on search activities performed on that computer. (See screenshot below)

What you search from your computer will not affect how you see results on Google

I hope you like this update. Please subscribe to our RSS Feed to stay informed on more similar stories.

As published in Financial Times on November 22, 2009, Microsoft is in talks with various news publishing companies like News Corp who owns The Wall Street Journal (in US), The Times (in UK), Daily Telegraph (in Australia) etc to have them de-index or remove their content from Google. In return, these media companies will get paid!

If that happens, we all would be really interested to see how will Google react. Will they pay more than what Microsoft offered? And if they do, we will see a new money making opportunity for the media companies to pull back their sinking ship. If search engines starts fighting for the exclusive rights of the content, we will be in a new era of web search.

Microsoft is in talks with News Corp to De-index its pages from Google

We may even hit the era where more players join the search engine war. Every warrior shows the unique content. So if I want to read health news, I will go to, say, healthyengine.com (a fictitious search engine which publishes exclusive news about health industry) instead of Google because Google does not have the rights to publish those news!

• http://www.example.com (TYPE 1)
• http://example.com/(TYPE 2)
• http://www.example.com/index.html (TYPE 3)

These URLs may point to the same webpage and show same content but technically they all are different. Search engine crawlers consider them as all different URLs which means they all will compete with each other for their positions in SERP.

Think about a scenario where 100 websites have put your link on their home page. 30 of those sites are pointing to Type 1 URL. 25 are pointing to Type 2 URL. 45 are pointing to Type 3 URL.

Now they are all pointing to your home page but to different URLs. So you are losing a huge chunk of backlinks for 1 common page which you could have got if all 100 links were pointing to just one URL.

There is a very simple solution to fix this problem. Choose just one common URL (whichever you prefer) and forward all the other URLs to that one URL. Make sure you use 301 redirect to forward the URLs.

Using 301 redirects can greatly help in consolidating your website rankings

It is a very simple technique to make sure you do not loose any link juice in the SEO Campaign for your website. If you liked reading this article on the KPMRS Blog, make sure to subscribe to our feed!

A very good friend of mine recently came to me with a grief after sudden drop of her personal blog on Cricket. It made me realize that people still give so much importance to Google PageRank and know so little about it & its relation with search engine rankings. This is the story behind the topic of today’s post on the so called importance of PageRank where I would like to share my personal views on why you should or should not worry about it.

What exactly is Google PageRank?

In Google’s own words :

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.

So PageRank is definitely not the rank where your website will appear on the search engines. Is is definitely not dependent on what content do you have on your web page. It is, IMHO,  just a yardstick by which one can gauge the popularity of their web pages on the web. To put it simply,

• The more people put your link on their web page, the higher you get your PageRank.
• The higher is the PageRank of the pages that have linked to your web page, the higher is the PageRank your web page receives.

Again, please keep in mind that Google PageRank DOES NOT determine how many visitors your website are getting or will get.

A funny animation about people's obsession with PageRank. Courtesy Blaugh.com

Are you one of those open your website in (say) firefox every day to just find your PageRank? If yes, stop doing that now because you won’t see it getting changed every day, not even weeks. But yes, thrice a year is acceptable. Because this is the approximate number of times that Google will update it. Here are the confirmed dates of when it was done in previous 2 years – just FYI

• 30 October 2009
• 28 May 2009
• 1 April 2009
• 31 December 2008
• 27 September 2008
• 29 April 2008
• 9 January 2008

Here is the official statement by one of the Google’s employee in their official discussion board

“We have been telling people for a long time that they shouldnt focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think its the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

More details on why not to obsess over PageRank here.

In a nutshell, the toolbar PR is fun, it’s interesting to compare greenness with friends, but it’s of little practical value in the world of SEO. If you liked reading this article on  the KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed now!

Let’s take the example of an online perfume store. The owner just started his business and the first thing he will do is set up a website. Then he starts wondering how can he get natural traffic from search engines? (Natural here means traffic for which you are not paying a dime). The answer is obvious – by getting his website to rank higher on search engines for the relevant terms that are most searched or most popular. But the catch here is – the more popular the term is, the more competition he will have! Finding the popularity of the search terms is very simple. I always use the Google Keyword  Tool to find out an estimated search volume of terms over last month.

For e.g., the keyword “perfume” was searched for a whopping 16.5 million times in the last month. And at the same time there are ~ 50 million search results for the same. So if our website owner targets the keyword “perfume”, he will be competing with as many websites for that coveted ranking. Now that doesn’t sound like a great choice for your target keyword. Its very likely that your SEO campaign will outlive your website if you follow targeting a keyword with such immense competition.

Its advisable to go for keywords that are long tailed and not highly competitive

Let’s assume that our website owner sells perfumes by Giorgio Armani as one of his products. After doing a quick lookup, we can find that “Giorgio armani men’s perfumes” was searched ~ 15,000 times which relatively less as compared to the term “perfume” but it has considerably lesser competition, just ~ 500,000 as compared to 51 million. Now this looks like a good keyword to target. We call it a ‘long tail keyword’ where instead of using 1-2 word phrases, you try to go for longer, 4-5 word keywords as the competition grows.

Oh, and yes, while we are talking about perfumes today, I would like to share a very nice & low priced perfume store I recently purchased my armani from – Spritzworld.com. Do check it out.

I hope you enjoyed today’s tip. Chip in your thoughts and comments. If you liked reading this post on the KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed!

“Where and how do I start my SEO Campaign from?”

We thought it would be a very good topic for our blog post & should help all our readers.

A couple of points to note before we start -

• We are assuming that you already have the domain name because finding a good domain name would be a separate topic of blog.
• This list is far from complete because there are still several other factors that affect your website position.

So, here are some of the most important steps that you can yourself take care of before going to any SEO company to manage your search engine marketing campaign.

1. Find your targeted keyword

The first and most important step is to determine what are the most important keywords for which you want your website to appear on search engines? You know your business more than anyone else. You know your target audience. So find out 10 phrases which you think that your prospective customers will search for.

It is much more complicated than it sounds. We just wrote about a simple tip on keyword research that a beginner should always do.

2. Set the title of your website pages right

After you have decided on your keywords, the next step is to set them up properly. The title of your web page is the very first thing that any search engine crawler will read and take as a factor to rank your website. Your homepage’s title should contain your targeted keyword. All the other pages of your website should have title related to the content of that respective page. For e.g., the title of the registration page should be “Registration”. Keep in mind that you are not promoting your “registration” page. The idea is to “set things right”.

3. Set up meta keywords and description

Though Google has said they do not read meta tags content but we still advise to put your targeted keywords in <meta name=”keywords”/> field and one line description of your website in <meta name=”description”/> field in your header tags. Many other search engines will still read them and Google won’t give you negative marks for that.

4. Unique content for the home page

Your website’s homepage should have a unique content describing your business. This introductory text should have the phrases that are in the title of the page. Experts say that you should use your targeted keyword 2-3 times in every 200 words so as to not get caught up for keyword stuffing. If possible, put your local business address and phone number on home page & contact us page to get noticed on “local business results” on Google.

5. Business Blog

Google loves to blog and so does the other search engines around. Having a business blog pays – and this is something you should always remember. Whatever business you have, you must write 1-2 blogs every week about your business. The articles can be about an industry news, a website update, a new recruit in your company – anything that relates in some way or the other to your business. It would be an icing on the cake, if you put these blogs on the homepage, just like what we have on KPMRS.

We recommend using wordpress because they are easy to set up and the come up with various SEO Plugins that help in optimizing your blog for search engine rankings.

6. Install traffic analyzer

Once your website is up, you would definitely want to monitor your traffic. Any analytics software will show you how many visitors come to your website daily, where are they coming from and which keywords do they use on search engines to get on to your website. These are the most important metrics.

We suggest using Google Analytics for 2 reasons -

1. It is free & provides everything you would want.
2. Our website discovery tool works very well with Google analytics to help you find the new keywords that bring you traffic. Read more about it on our previous blog post here.

7. Monitor your website rankings

• Of course you are just starting your campaign. You might not be in top 100 on Google but sooner or later if you do the right things at the right time, you will find yourself in top 10 for that elite group of your targeted keywords. We, at KPMRS, offer this service for free. You can register your website with your targeted keywords and we will monitor your rankings on daily basis. You can be rest assure to get notified by email as soon as your rank has changed for Google, Yahoo or Bing. This will even help you track the work done by whichever SEO company you have chosen for your campaign.

8. Setup business profiles on social media websites

Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious are some of the buzz words today in social media industry. Setting up your business profile on these & similar websites are must for a starter. Maintaining & optimizing them is again a different topic of discussion about which we will soon post here.

We hope that you found this list as a good starting point to help you in setting up your SEO Campaign. We also advise our clients to educate themselves by spending 30 minutes daily in reading latest news in the SEO world. You may not be professionals but you sure don’t want to appear dumb when you talk to a SEO Company. Official blogs of Google, Bing, & Yahoo are good starting point but there are hundreds of freelance bloggers that can provide really valuable information as well. A few ones that we love

• http://www.dailyseoblog.com
• http://www.seo-theory.com
• http://www.seomoz.org
• http://www.webmasterworld.com (Highly Recommended)

Well, we have finished our part. Time for you now to add more points which you think would be useful for a beginner in the SEO world. If you like reading this post on the KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed!

“While Validation may be good internally (for your website/organization), we have to make sure that the number of bytes returned to the users is as small as possible”, and added, that “Google does NOT provide any boost in ranking to pages that are validated”.

Now, those two sentences probably sum up the interview, and require some explaining, notwithstanding how casually they have been quoted. But first, a background check. The W3C validation is a service provided by the World Wide Web Consortium that prescribes a set of HTML coding standards for web pages. The service also allows coders to check for any markup errors in the pages authored by them. The objective of the HTML validation standards is similar to the objective behind traditional accounting practices or programming conventions – to produce Web pages that are:

1. Neat (user-friendly)
2. Accessible (from different devices)
3. Compatible (with different multimedia formats)
4. Manageable
5. Universally understood (similar displays on different browsers), and
6. Easy to update.

Despite all the apparent advantages, a majority of web pages on the internet are not validated. In fact, w3c and wikipedia confirm that less than 20% of the major search engine and browser websites are validated and error free.

A good number of search engine homepages are not w3c validated themselves

Reason: What Google says in the interview.

If you were to design a web page, the most primary of your targets will be:

a) to keep the page loading times as low as possible; and

b) to ensure that your page is compatible with all common browsers in the market.

And the prospect of tweaking with your optimized HTML coding to even slightly increase your page size or decrease compatibility with browsers, is something that is generally seen as avoidable, in spite of however form of validation that may bring to your page. Also, the SEO benefits that are often stated in support of W3C validation are indirect and unquantifiable, at best, and validated pages receive no special attention from Search Engines; as affirmed by Google. The spokesperson also went on record saying that, “We would love if a Googler would spend 20% time trying to make sure we validate, and I think we can validate and still have a small page size.” Clearly, Google thinks of validation as frivolous or something that occupies a secondary priority at best.

Image Courtesy: Rob Cottingham & cvwdesign.com

For rhetoric, when a major web entity doesn’t care to validate, would you? Let us know what you think about it. If you liked reading this post on the KPMRS blog, do subscribe to our feed now!

Google says that it disregards the meta keyword tags in SE Rankings. Image Courtesy: wipeout44.com

So, is there a need to keep the “meta keywords” tag or should we start removing them? Einstein had famously said “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot!”

Lets see what bing has to say about “meta” tag on their webmaster blog? Rick DeJarnette from the Bing Webmaster Center Team writes

The <meta> tag’s keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.

When creating keyword text, remember the following:

• Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the <title> and <meta> description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure.
• Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters.
• Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the listl

That leaves us in a fix. Google Vs Bing. Who should we go with?

Google, which has more than 65% of market share in the search industry.

OR

Bing, which was  recently reported as fastest growing search engine.

My personal opinion would be that you should keep meta keywords tag and populate a couple of your most targeted keywords while making sure that you DO NOT overstuff it. This means you are adding not more than 100 bytes of data in your web page which  will take less than few milliseconds to load. Plus Google never said that this will have negative impact so there is no harm. And since they left it open that their policies may change in future which means, if they do, you do not have to start filling in again. You will be already prepared. And at the same time, you are following the guidelines by Bing and making sure that your web page is optimized for that as well.

What do you think about this particular paradox? Share your thoughts with us. If you liked reading this post, do bookmark us and subscribe to our feed!

Expectant surprise then mere disappointment – those are what one encounters when one uses the Yahoo Search Pad. Launched as a free service, with no content downloads, installations or other hassles required, this service generated a lot of hype and subsequently, a lot of expectations; especially after the marketing stalwarts at Yahoo unveiled a demo video earlier this year, portraying Yahoo Search Pad as the ultimate consumer-friendly search assistant. Yahoo Search Pad has been marketed as a search engine notepad that can assist you with your researches (searches on specific topics) on the Internet by automatically saving notes for you, so can leave the research midway and resume it later, organize your notes, and share all the research jottings you have taken down, with family and friends. Yes, it is that basic a product. Wondering why nobody thought of it earlier?

Well, people have. We have had some marginally successful attempts like Google Notebook, Jeteye, among others at creating search engine notepads. But, the innovation that gets Yahoo Search Pad at the top of the product chain is the linking of Search Pads with Social Networking websites. I mean, who wouldn’t want to research stuff when you can publish it and show-off your glorious findings on the Internet, to all those who care to see?

The Yahoo Search Pad helps you in your research by saving it for later reference. Image Courtsey: tothetech.com.

Features and Usage:

One of the major benefits of using the Yahoo Search Pad is its instinctive ease of use. Just log on to the Yahoo Search Engine, sign in to your Yahoo ID, click on the small ‘pen and pad’ icon you see below the header on the top right on  the search results page, create a new notebook and you’re all set to get down to researching! As you research, this wonder of a notepad will automatically detect the topics of your research and save addresses of URLs related to your research accompanied by snapshots of those webpages. You can also manually add text notes and organize your notes bulk in any fashion you see fit. The Search Pad will then try to search for the references of your text notes and will automatically label them with URLs, if the text comes from a popular page. And finally, when you are done editing and organizing your research, you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, or Delicious, providing others the opportunity to browse through and gain from your research. Unfortunately, the wonderment ends here, and disappointment follows.

A Search Pad notebook: Organize your notes and share them with the world! Image Courtsey: venturebeat.com.

Criticism:

For all its intelligence in automatically finding out what you’re searching for, Yahoo! Search Pad seems to have a simple algorithm built into it: If the researcher is spending more than a minute at a particular URL, note it down! This will become more clear the from the following experiment I performed, which gave a result that can be recreated with ease:

I researched on a popular PC video game called Batman: Arkham Asylum. I visited a generous list of popular game reviewing websites like IGN, Gamespot, 1up, and others, and made manual text notes on the Search Pad by copy-pasting content from most of those websites, to test if the Search Pad could automatically find references for them. The Search Pad was mildly efficient at this, only finding correct URLs for some 30-40% of the manual notes taken down. This exercise continued for some 7-10 minutes and through it, I had thoroughly ‘trained‘ the Search Pad into knowing what I was researching on. Now, to test the Pad’s Artificial Intelligence, I opened YouTube in one of the open tabs and searched for ‘Funny Cats’. I sat through the 2:46 minutes of the amusing first video that appeared on the search results. I then looked in the Search Pad to check whether it was confused through the abrupt change of  research topics. To my mild surprise, the Search Pad had recorded the Video URL in a long list of URLs that had Batman written all over them and had nothing to do with humor or, well, cats. I again searched for Goobuntu, an unrelated topic, and took a minute reading the wiki page that was first to show up in the results. Needless to say, the Search Pad had again recorded the wiki URL in a notebook that was filled with references from an entirely disconnected topic.
It becomes clear from the above exercise that the Yahoo Search Pad can get confused as easily as it can help you with your research. Relying on the Search Pad to ‘artificially know’ what you want is a hope in vain. The Pad is simply a book keeping tool when you’re indulging in Extremely specific researches (also, the Yahoo website help section provides no information whatsoever on whether the Search Pad will work Search Engines other than Yahoo). And I would want echo what I said earlier, the prospect of sharing your researches on Social Networks remains the most powerful feature of this Pad.

Verdict:

The Yahoo Search Pad is definitely a inventive offering with ambitious thought behind it, but it fails to implement much of that ambitiousness. We also think that the Search Pad might not witness explosive popularity but will influence and force the software industry big wigs to think and re-think their ideas behind the Next Gen of Search Assistants.

If you liked reading this review, do subscribe to our feed!

Monitor your Website Rankings on Search Engines and Social Networks

The KPMRS Bar (for Firefox 3.0+ & Internet Explorer 6+) sits in your web browser and monitors your Website Rankings on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Additionally, the Toolbar also lists your ranks on various popular Social Media Websites including Technorati, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Digg, YouTube, and many more. The KPMRS Bar is a perfect combo of usability and accessibility, giving you your website ranks on search engines and social networks, in almost no time at all. And did we mention that, like our other services, the Download is absolutely free? Yes, click here to download the KPMRS Bar!

So, instead of painfully waiting for an Analytics website to load and give you data about your website that is confusing as well as redundant, just fire up your browser and enter your website name and keyword in the KPMRS Bar to get useful data that keeps you informed of your Website performance on Search Engines and Social Networks! Get the KPMRS Bar now!

If you like reading about such KPMRS product updates from time-to-time, do subscribe to our blog feed!