Creating a hold in the market has always been difficult, especially with the rising requirements of the users. Hence, it’s extremely arduous to even think that Blekko will be successful in upsetting Google’s long reign. Moreover, in the recent times, other new search engines like Wikia and Cuil, etc. that released in the market with great fervor, failed miserably to win the hearts of all surfers. However, most web analysts are keeping their fingers crossed about the features of this new search engine.

Blekko has been in the labs for more than 2.5 years now and has been crafted to perfection by its developers, keeping in mind the requirements of all its users. The new search engine has been co-founded and developed by Rich Skrenta (CEO) along with his partners and fellow developers. Blekko is currently in the private alpha session and will soon be provided to testers for its beta version. Once both these stages are cleared, it will soon be launched across the online market this summer.

Blekko is a well designed, fully functional search engine that includes regular search engine crawls to over billions of webpages. So, what is the difference between Blekko and Google, as the later also offers the same? Blekko differentiates itself from the others in a very unique way. The new forthcoming search engine is designed to offer essential tools to the users for performing new advanced searches which cannot be performed elsewhere. It also differentiates itself from the others by offering its users an extraordinary open access to important algorithms and other vital data that the search engine follows for determining the relevancy of the websites.

According to the company designing the search engine, the algorithms followed by Blekko is mostly similar to that of Bing and Google. However, the only difference is that of its refinement tools which are called as the Slashtags. Most of these Slashtag tools such as the /news, /amazon, /date, /blogs, etc. help the users to instantly filter the results that are being searched by them. The tool allows the users to create personal Slashtags for their desired websites.

Based on its innovative features and flexibility, Blekko is surely to be liked by its users. Any person, who has used the entire series of search tools designed by Google, will give Blekko thumbs up. Blekko is fast, and advanced than the most recent search engines. It is also liked by people for its transparency in showing up its data and algorithms that it follows for website ranking. Hence, you can easily have a look at the duplicated contents, inbound links, metadata for domains, etc. which are crucial SEO details usually followed by people for optimizing their website’s traffic and ranking. It also provides a list of other minute details about the website’s SEO stats which prove to be a great help in planning a website’s SEO. You can check the basic SEO requirements for enhancing your webpage and hence divert huge traffic to your website. As a result, it could be the best search engine that any SEO professional might ask for.

We are equally excited to see it’s launch and will keep our readers posted as soon as this new kid in the town will go live.  Join our blog feed to stay connected with us.

Her’s what we are offering:

White labeled SEO Software for your clients: Managing a successful web development company for over 10 years has taught us so much about the industry. We have learned how SEO industry works and what do SEO companies need to provide better service to their customers. This inspired us to build suite of SEO Tools to help companies like you so that you offer out of the box SEO tools to your clients. Website rank tracker, social media monitoring, backlinks tracker are some of the tools that have shown immense potential. But if you have any other ideas, you tell us and we will build it for you.

Apart from white labeled SEO Tools, you will also be able to discover new business opportunities from our parent company – Galaxy Weblinks Inc., which is is a decade old software development and internet marketing company with a large team & multiple offshore offices in India. We are trying to increase our presence in the US Market and that is why we are looking for partners with whom we can succeed in facilitating their business success on the web.

We would like to extend our invitation to you and your company to visit this Conference and Expo. Don’t forget to use the Priority Code 20GALA to avail your 20% discount on conference passes!

Location Details: Hilton New York, 1335 Ave Americas, New York, NY 10019.
Event Schedule: Click here.
Tuesday, March 23 – 10:00am-6:45pm
Wednesday, March 24 – 10:00am-4:00pm
We look forward to your attendance!

The above video is a recreation of a talk rendered by Matt Cutts at PubCon in Las Vegas in November 2009. The talk titled “State of the Index” dwells with Google’s efforts in the passing year in helping users, web developers, and webmasters to perform better. Matt starts off by talking about the commitment Google showed last year to make itself more user-friendly. The launch of web browser Chrome, Mobile OS Android and Collaboration Platform Wave with each having large open-source components have made web surfing more exciting and enjoyable.

The introduction of Music OneBox, which allows using an artist’s name and a song name for searching, is definitely going to bring cheer to music enthusiasts. Music OneBox enables users to easily buy MP3 of songs in addition to playing the songs. Music OneBox also comes with a brand-new feature, which gives users the power to search for songs using the song lyrics. The recently launched Google Squared has the capabilities to redefine web searching as it permits users to get relevant results for almost anything they type in.

With Google Social Search, you can use keywords to retrieve related content posted online by fellow web surfers who belong to your social circle. Having a Google profile makes it easy to use Google Social Search. The Show Options feature of Google allows users to customize their search in virtually any way they want. Google’s Wonder Wheel feature presents users with a variety of data related with a keyword search. Now, Matt Cutts turns his attention to Google’s efforts in the passing year aimed at making things easier for web developers.

In 2010, Google could make loading speed of websites one of the factors considered while assigning page ranks to them as a fast-loading site definitely improves the user-friendliness. Visiting Page Speed on Google Code will enable web developers to access all the tools Google has created for them to make their sites fast-loading. Matt advices to visit webpagetest.org as this site helps developers to know about the loading times of each individual component of their websites. Although this site is not a part of Google, it gives developers information on all the changes that will make their sites fast-loading.

Closure, as assortment of tools introduced by Google recently empowers web developers to perform more efficiently. Closure acts as a compiler, library and templating system. Library, with 180 UI elements among other things helps developers to save java script creating time and compiler helps developers to make their java script more compact. Some of the UI elements like DatePicker are the same as those used by Google.

2009 saw Google coming out with more products and services from its kitty. Courtesy efan78.com

Google Web Toolkit (again a project from Google Code), used by Google Wave and Google AdWords, which comes with many reusable components, enables users to compile Java codes easier and more effectively. AJAX Libraries API tool from Google provides latest Ajax versions, which will allow developers to set up highly secure websites. Finally, Matt shifts his focus to things that show Google’s concern for providing webmasters with tools and resources that will make them better equipped and more powerful. rel=canonical, introduced by Google in February 2009, embraced by all major search engines, permits a webmaster to inform search engines that two websites are the same and links to them should be added up. The Ignore url parameters feature of Google allows webmasters to eliminate unnecessary parameters. With Fetch as Googlebot tool, webmasters can ask Google to show them what Googlebot saw when it traversed their sites or a page in their sites. This tool will help webmasters spot and remove hacked content. The Better Malware Warnings tool informs webmasters exactly what is giving rise to malware in their sites so that they will be able to get rid of the malware cause more easily.

The Message Forwarding feature forwards, in the form of emails, the messages received by a webmaster in the Webmaster Counsel. Google’s Keyword details feature gives webmasters the opportunity to know the top sites that are acting as competitors to them for a particular keyword. The four things that Google did that are intended for Better Communication are Google Webmaster Blog, SEO Beginner’s Guide, We don’t use key word meta tags, which helps webmaster to escape lawsuits and Webmaster console: 40 languages. Webmasters can get Google’s latest helpful stuff by visiting Google Webmaster Central on YouTube.

Matt Cutts ends the video by briefing about Google Caffiene and doing a bit of prediction for the future. Google Caffiene is constituted by a new indexing architecture and it is more flexible and faster. Hacking and malware are going to rise and Google will take steps to minimize their influence as much as possible. He also lists the four things that must be given attention to among the things that have been described in this video. They are doing social search, making site fast-loading, utilizing webmaster console and subscribing to official blog and video channel.

If your site pages have good content, submit them to buzz and digg. Both have a high chance of getting your page indexed.

Now, ideally this does make sense because both Yahoo Buzz and Digg are popular source of latest content for search engines but why would ANY search engine share this kind of information explicitly with the SEO community and webmasters?

Whatever the reason is, I am pretty sure we will see a spike of traffic going up for both Digg & Yahoo in coming weeks!

But what exactly is Blended Search?

As the name suggests, Blended search is the process of blending or mixing content from multiple sources and displaying them together on one page. When the idea was launched around two and a half years ago, the main sources of the content were – news websites, videos, images, local and books which are still independent vertical search engines. But today, we have started seeing more results from social networks like facebook & twitter and press release website which are updated more frequently than any other online media.

Universal Search is also known as Blended Search. Click on image to expand

And how is it changing the SEO industry?

Earlier, website owners used to optimize their website with only focus on relevant content so that search engines can rank their websites on top of search results. It doesn’t work the same these days now since search engines do not only rely on your website content. Instead, they have started looking for varied sources of information where they can find more relevant and updated content.  News websites like CNN & Reuters; Social networking sites like Facebook & twitter; and Press release website like prweb.com etc are some of the sources that search engines rely heavily on for their content.

Please note that this doesn’t mean you should stop optimizing your website content. On the contrary, you need to start updating your website content more frequently now since search engines love new, updated & relevant content. This is probably why many company blogs and press releases have become so popular these days.

But is it really changing the SEO industry?

Yes, it is. Because people have really started publishing their content on all the types of online media which has slight chance of being crawled by search engines and get ranked on first page. Here are the few examples -

1. Image results – All the search engines already have image search as an independent search engine which drives more than 10% of traffic for website owners. People have been focusing on optiming their images by using alt tags and more proper image names for quite some time now.
2. Videos & Slideshows- YouTube, owned by Google has the highest number of videos uploaded on the web. People have started publishing a video presentation of their company or products demo. They, then promote it on YouTube by writing comments, adding ratings and sharing with more people so that it gets enough popularity to get ranked on first page of search results. Then these videos or presentations are pushed on to other popular aggregator sites like Vimeo, Slideshare etc.
3. News Results – Press & news websites are the most hit upon source by website owners. There has been an evident surge in press releases published in last few years by website owners. The only reason being the importance given to such sites by Google.
4. Local business listings – Google, Bing and Yahoo show their respective maps to show local business listings. Hence, every website owner makes it a point that their business is submitted in local business listing directory. They strive hard to promote it by adding more ratings, comments and sharing with friends & existing clients.
5. Three blogs a week has become a reality. Website owners do not miss a single news however trivial it is, just to have something new up on their company blog. [Don't worry this post is not one of those ]
6. Social media marketing (SMM) – SEO Companies have started offering a new service called ‘Social media marketing’ wherein they promote their brand on social networking websites like – Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, Myspace etc. They do it by submitting their brand name, linking it to their website, building network of friends and by commenting on other blogs.
7. Google Product search – Online shop owners are utilizing this feature to promote their products on increase sales from Google organic search result.  Google offers merchants a separate place to submit their products individually with prices and description. Google then shows their products on top of search results for the relevant query.

Clearly, the focus on just your website’s content is the thing of the past. In order to maximize your chances to be on the top of the search engine rankings and drive more traffic, you have to be on your toes all the time and exploit every source of data that major search engines scour today for their search results.

Let us know what you think of today’s post. We look forward to your comments on the latest trends being used in the SEO world. If you liked reading this post on The KPMRS Blog, do subscribe to our feed now!

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!

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!

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!

Microsoft's Bing will now power Yahoo's Search Results.

But what does it really mean to your website rankings? How would it effect your SEO efforts? Our experts analyzed its possible consequences and are trying to answer some of the questions you are probably wondering about right now. Read on…

1. Should I optimize my website for Yahoo! SERPs now ?

There’s no need, really. Especially since Yahoo! will henceforth use Bing’s algorithm to show its search results, which basically means you will be wasting your time if you optimize for Yahoo!

2. Will my site’s current rankings change on Yahoo?

Yes, it should since Yahoo! will now be powered by Microsoft’s search technology which means search results should be the same on Yahoo and Bing. This deal will most like be a boon to those webmasters and SE Experts who are ranking well on Bing. Obviously, we’re not very hopeful about the current top rankers on Yahoo!

3. What about Yahoo! Search APIs, site explorer etc?

Honestly, even we do not have a clear answer to this. We think, however, that it would now be influenced by Bing (Microsoft) results as well. We’ll of course let you know when we know ourselves

4. Will Yahoo’s (paid) directory submissions be any useful for my website rankings now?

Yahoo’s paid directory submission has never been the factor of your organic search ranking. So no, it will not effect your ranks.

So here we are, providing you a first hand account of the latest buzz in the Search Engine World along with our humble opinion about the same. We’d like to know your feedback about this development and its possible consequences. Don’t forget to drop your comments below. We’ll keep you updated with more information as it comes.

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