Tag Archives: SEO

SEO marketing and SERPs

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Last update : June 29, 2013
SEO (Search engine optimization) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s natural search results (natural = un-paid, organic, algorithmic). A SERP (search engine results page) is the listing of results returned by a search engine in response to a keyword query.

For WordPress, the leading content management system for blogs, there are number of performant plugins that make it easy to optimize your posts.

The deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes is called spamdexing. Common spamdexing techniques can be classified into two broad classes : content spam and link spam. See the related post for informations about pagerank, content farms, search quality and black hat SEO.

More informations about SEO and related topics are available at the following links :

Pagerank, Content Farms, Search Quality and Black Hat SEO

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Last update : June 29, 2013
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents. PageRank has been patented; the patent is assigned to Stanford University and exclusively licensed to Google.

The PageRank of a website is shown in the Google toolbar. The PageRank score was however removed by Google in October 2009 from the Webmaster Tools, because Google has been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much. PageRank is not an important metric for search engine optimisation.

Several providers continue to find the  PageRank data useful and offer free PageRank checkers, for instance at the website www.prchecker.info.

The term content farm is used to describe a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue through attracting reader page views. Critics allege that content farms provide relatively low quality content.

Search engines see content farms as a problem, as they tend to bring the user to less relevant and lower quality results of the search. On February 24th, 2011, Google announced that they were making a substantial change in their ranking algorithms to purge low-quality informations in the search results.

A black hat is the bad guy in a western movie. In computing slang it refers to a computer hacker. Black Hat search engine optimization is defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner. Some of these techniques are keyword stuffing, invisible (hidden) text, cloaking, duplicate content and doorway pages.

Further informations about the Google search algorithms are available at the scriptol website.

Google gadgets and Yahoo widgets

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In 2003, Konfabulator, a startup, released a paid software that consisted of cool standalone applets that did all sorts of stuff from telling the time, to monitoring stock market prices, to displaying your calendar. Mid-2005, Yahoo acquired the startup, and then offered Konfabulator as freeware, both for Mac OS X and Windows. They call it now widgets. In 2006, Google introduced Google gadgets, a precursor has been the side panels in the Google Desktop.

Google Gadgets are interactive mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on your desktop or on your iGoogle page to show you new email, weather, photos and personalized news. Other gadgets include the clock, calendar, scratch pad, todo list and many more. Google Gadgets are made by users that offer cool and dynamic content and can be placed also on any page on the web.

All Desktop gadgets use the Gadget API. They can also use core JavaScript features and the XMLHttpRequest class. Windows-only Desktop gadgets can include native Windows libraries and use selected Search APIs to take advantage of Google Desktop search features.

Google offers a Desktop SDK that has everything you need to write Google Gadgets and to integrate desktop searching into your applications. A development forum, a FAQ webpage and a hall of fame are available to provide valuable feedback on creating gadgets.

Google gadgets can also been used in Lively, a 3D virtual experience that is the newest addition to Google Labs and that was released as beta on July 10th, 2008. Lively gadgets provide rich media and interaction capabilities to users.

A great site for gadgets, widgets and SEO is Seoish, run by Patrick Sexton alias Feedthebot.