One theory is that the drop in traffic isn’t really a result of Google changing the way it handles long-tail searches at all. It’s a result of Google further devaluing links from sketchy websites or websites of low importance. This means that websites that saw a drop after this update are simply seeing a drop in their rankings as a result of losing some of the links that maybe shouldn’t have counted before in the first place.

Others (See Tedster’s theory in this Webmaster World discussion thread) say that it is indeed a change in how Google deals with long-tail phrases, but only inasmuch as it has changed its phrase match methodologies. Meaning that if someone typed in “Denver seafood restaurant quiet dinning Lodo”, rather than just showing results that match individual keywords, it may be identifying phrases within the long-tail search, in this case, “Denver seafood restaurant” and displaying indexed results that are relevant to that entire phrase.

Another theory is that Google is just culling some pages from its index that it deems not important enough to take up space in its memory in order to keep the speed increase up that it has seen as a result of its Caffeine update. This would mean that if your site was getting traffic on some of its ancillary pages from long-tail search phrases, it’s not that Google has changed how it’s displaying results for those phrases, it’s that those pages of your site are just GONE from Google’s index, so they aren’t showing up anymore.

Whatever the cause, if you’ve seen a change in your traffic from long-tail search phrases, stop and take stock of your traffic. How much has it dropped? Be sure to look a month or two before May 1st and compare it to now, bearing in mind that not quite a month has passed since the May Day Update hit. Do a site: search on Google and see if you have fewer pages showing up in Google’s index. Use some internal link building to donate some link juice from more important pages to some of the long-tail content that was dropped from the index so that Google may re-include them. Acquire some more high-quality links to replace some of the low-quality links that Google may have discounted. Above all, just make sure that your SEO strategies are focusing on sound, white hat SEO techniques. If you’re doing that, you’re less likely to feel the sting of these updates. In fact, most algorithm updates will help you!

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1. Google Algorithm Update Analysis
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Optimizing your posts is the first step that you can take in making your SEO blog. You want to make your title focused around the main topic or idea in your posts. You will want to repeat this title or term throughout the blog. However, you will want to repeat the term in a way that sounds the most natural. You will not want to throw in your keywords just anywhere. Making your blog posts enjoyable and easy for your readers to read is great for business and optimization. Updating your blog on a regular basis is also needed for optimization. You never want to let your SEO blog be stale. This will lead to a loss of readers. When you are updating on a regular basis, you will be able to hold the attention of your readers. Asking for feedback from your readers is also a great way to keep them interested in your blog.

Social bookmarking has become very popular. By including social bookmarking buttons on your blog posts, you will be making it easier for your readers to share your blogs with others. This is a great way to increase traffic to your blog and website. Video is another great way to optimize your blog and interest your readers. You can use videos to show products that you offer or you can use them solely for your readers’ enjoyment. When you create interesting and informative blog posts for your readers, they are more apt to spread the word about your business or company.

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Hakia

Today’s search engines bring popular results via statistical ranking methods, but a popular website may not always be credible, and a credible website may not always be popular. As a result, searchers suffer in many ways ranging from wasted search time to using misleading information.

Twine

People use Twine to keep track of their interests. Twine is a new way for you to collect online content – videos, photos, articles, web pages, products – and bring it all together by topic, so you can have it in one place and share it with anyone you want.

Wolfram|Alpha

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.

Scoopler

Scoopler is a real-time search engine. Scoopler aggregates and organizes content being shared on the Internet as it happens, like eye-witness reports of breaking news, photos and videos from big events, and links to the hottest memes of the day. It does this by constantly indexing live updates from services including Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious and more.

TweetMeme

TweetMeme is a service, which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. TweetMeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what your interested in.

OneRiot

Increasingly, the web’s most interesting content is what our friends and other people are talking about, sharing and looking at right now. However, when people search for that content, traditional search engines struggle to surface these fresh, socially relevant results. That’s the hole – and it’s a big one – that OneRiot is filling.

SearchMe

SearchMe, the first multimedia search engine: Search for information, videos, music, images, news and more, and find the most relevant results displayed in a comprehensive blend of multimedia and non-multimedia web pages.

Cuil

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years, but search engines have not kept up—until now. Cuil searches more pages on the web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Kosmix

Kosmix is a guide to the Web. The website lets users explore the web by topic, presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics. Kosmix’s categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine-style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the web.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends. It’s fast and easy to start a conversation around shared items, or to show that you like something a friend has shared.

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1. Writing for Search Engines

Since the search engine spiders cannot read or comprehend videos you must use the text fields to optimize your videos appropriately. This means doing keyword research and making sure your keywords appear in the title, description, and tags of your video is imperative to a successful YouTube marketing campaign. Maximize on the amount of text you can have in these fields. More text means a better chance of someone finding and clicking into your video. Make sure you use original titles and descriptions otherwise your video will get lost in the millions of videos with similar names. Original content is what YouTube wants to see. The more originality you add the better off you will be. You also want to have a user name with your brand or website name so it is easily remembered.

You have to put everything into perspective to increase views, as the average video only receives one hundred views annually. According to YouTube guidelines there are many factors that influence rankings and can help optimize your videos. These include the video title, the description, tags, incoming links, comments, subscribers, ratings, playlist additions, flagging, embeds, shares, age of video, channel views, subscribers, views, and the number and quality of sites that host or point to your video. You want to interact on YouTube by watching other videos, commenting, subscribing, creating channels, and making friends. Interaction helps with the viral marketing, where one person tells another person about the video. This person tells five others and so on. Doing this will increase your video network and views. All these factor into ranking high for YouTube optimization.

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2. How to Use LinkedIn for SEO
3. Try to Avoid Black Hat Methods

Of course, even though you more than likely already use several social networking sites, you may not yet be sure of how much those sites can help improve your rankings. One of the best sites to take advantage of is LinkedIn. The main reason for this is that the site already enjoys phenomenal rankings due to the profiles which are hosted on it.

In the event that you already have a LinkedIn account then you can already begin improving your website’s SEO with your LinkedIn account. In fact, let’s take a look at a few simple ways for using LinkedIn in order to improve the SEO of your website or blog:

Step 1: Making Use of Anchor Text and Links

Even though this is incredibly simple, it’s of the utmost importance, if you want to increase the SEO of your site. You need to use anchor text in order to link to your website from your LinkedIn profile. When you create links to your various websites, it results in potentially profitable backlinks, and this is why it’s important to use anchor text which makes use of specific keywords which are relevant to your website.

You need to bear in mind that major search engines such as Google will quite literally scrutinize anchor text when they rank websites. This of course means that if you had web site specific key words to your anchor text, your SEO will be vastly improved. In other words you need to avoid using names like “My Website” or George’s Blog, but instead, you should try to be a little bit more creative.

Step 2: Keyword Focus When Composing Your Profile

When you sit down to type up your LinkedIn profile, it’s imperative that you focus on using the most relevant keywords. During the process you’ll be required to include a headline, personal interests, summary, and also job descriptions and etc. Without over doing it, try to keep your profile rich with relevant keywords relating to your specific website or blog.

Step 3: Add Connections

The importance of using LinkedIn for adding connections simply cannot be stressed enough, particularly if your goal is to improve the SEO of your website. In doing this, you’ll effectively be making your website more visible, bearing in mind that the more connections you have, the more visible your site will be to people out there in cyberspace. Over and above increasing your website’s visibility on the LinkedIn site, you’ll also be increasing the overall visibility of your own website or blog on the internet.

Step 4: Customize Your URL

Lastly but not least, you need to customize the URL which you have on the LinkedIn site, bearing in mind that LinkedIn members have an opportunity to customize their profile URL, rather than making do with the default one. In fact, you can even choose to change the URL to your own name, the name of your company, or even the name of your website. You can rest assured that if you do this it will result in your profile becoming far more visible, and this in turn goes a long way towards improving the SEO of your website.

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There has always been debate about whether, and the extent to which, keyword-rich URLs contribute to a pages. It is commonly believed that keywords in the permalink do indeed contribute to a page’s SERPs.

The structure of WordPress permalinks is dictated by a series of settings and parameters found under the Settings > permalinks section, within the administrator console.

In order to fully optimize the permalink structure, aim to use your target keywords in the leftmost position of the URL. In order to do this you would need a custom structure containing the single parameter /%postname%. This creates a permalink based on the post title. It is then up to you to choose a unique, keyword-rich and compelling title for each of your posts.

Be aware that using just the /%postname% parameter compels you to create unique titles for every post on your blog in order to avoid collisions (where two articles might have the same permalink, clearly not a good situation).

Also, be aware that if your blog is established with numerous indexed pages then your should avoid altering your permalink structure without a full understanding of the consequences. It will affect your backlinks, trackbacks and ultimately your SERPs. Usually, optimizing a blog’s permalink structure should be undertaken during the early stages of the blog’s development, and before a substantial content base is developed.

There are several plug-ins available that allow auto-manipulation of post slugs and consequently permalinks. These often remove “noise” words (such as “the”, “and” and alike) with the belief that increasing the overall keyword density of the permalink, and shifting the keywords leftward, will ultimately increase the link weight. Although these plug-ins might offer some small SEO benefit, be extra cautious when using these on active blogs for the same reasons stated above.

Later iterations of WordPress offer the facility to edit the permalink before publishing in a box just beneath the post title when writing it. This way you can manually create a permalink for the post or manually crop noise words prior to publishing.

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Article submission seems very easy, but here are some critical points you should keep in mind while submitting an article.

• First, Read the Terms of Service of the Article Directory Before Submitting Your Article. You should make sure that you are following all the rules because, if you break one your article will be removed. It hardly takes 5 minutes to read the rules and then you can submit the article in a form that will drive maximum traffic and will never be removed.  Their can be rules like you cannot have links of your affiliates in your articles. Further, there are many people who also paste their adsense code in the articles. These links are not allowed in most directories.
• You Should Create Products Line. Most directories will allow you to describe the products and services you sell. Further, you can write comments like “to read similar articles visit my website” and then you can point your website. When your article is well written you can have many people visiting your website through it. Further, you should visit a good articles directory and find the most popular articles and start writing your articles in a similar way. This way your articles will also be famous one day.
• You Should Submit in Appropriate Categories. You should search for correct categories describing your articles. If you place an article in a wrong category it would be deleted by the moderators of the directory. Even if your article is not deleted there is no use of having it in wrong categories.
• You Should Do Manual Articles Submission. However there are many applications available for submitting the articles to a directory but not all directories follow a single pattern of rules. Some articles directories allow you to have HTML after the article and a few will allow in body as well. Further, some directories allow only few tags. So you should try to do manual submission.
• Check the Details of Articles Directory. You should not just submit an article to a directory just because it allows submitting articles for free. You should check the traffic and pagerank of the directory as well. Only if the directory has good pagerank and has good unique traffic you should submit your articles to it.
• Hire a Person. If you do not have time to follow the above tips then you should hire a professional to submit your articles. When you don’t have money and time then you must submit selected articles to few selected directories and still you should follow these tips for effective submission.

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If you are a traditional company who manufactures products or sells services, you already know the pitfalls of marketing, no matter how developed the theory of marketing is and how much research has gone into studies. For instance, if you were to segment your market and target a segment to position your product, you would have to do extensive market research to study the cross section of the society in question. The market is never organized and you would be required to decipher the patterns in consumption habits and cultural inclinations. Most importantly, the market is spread across wide territories and is seldom structured or channelized to perfection.

Online marketing, on the other hand, has a clear starting point, which you can tackle. For instance, consider Google Analytics. This tool from Google comes with a host of reports and insights into the hits recorded in a website. Analytics reports on such issues as who has visited the website, the keywords used to get to the site, the number of pages in the site visited, the path taken by visitors before they stumbled upon the website, the pages that were the entry points for visitors and the pages that served as their exit points from the site. In other words, you have a tool that silently gathers information about Consumer Behavior online.

Loaded with this information, you can decide what you want to do with your site to respond to your consumers’ behavioral patterns and also to make the changes necessary to your web presence so that your consumer’s behavior is suitably modified to suit your needs. If you could know, for instance, the amount of time spent by your visitors on each of your pages, you have the information on your web pages’ effectiveness.

Online marketing can be loaded with a host of powerful tools that would look Internet marketing look like a breeze when compared to real world marketing. While there is no such thing as a free walk in the park, you have a structured environment and an organized space to play around with your creativity and marketing instincts.

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2.) Facebook gives us some clues regarding its algorithmic ranking factors.  Read it and understand. Stay up to speed on changes in the Facebook blog, as they will certainly occur. Hopefully as Facebook grows they’ll make a search quality team ambassador available like Google’s Matt Cutts and Bing’s Sasi Parthasarathy. As people learn to spam these results, Facebook will react and SEOs will want more information.

3.) In addition to wall posts, think SEO in tendering status updates, links and notes. You never know who will find it, searching for whatever.

4.) Wall-post external content like blog posts and news should be optimized for important keywords, especially the content’s title tag. If possible post content where the call to action and/or contact information is actually in the title tag. This gets your pitch to the search results as opposed to requiring a second click through to a profile page.

5.) If you want your promotional data indexed in the wider Facebook, outside of your friends, make sure you select “everyone” in privacy settings > search. Though it’s possible users might not be happy if they were aware, existing accounts default to “everyone,” understanding this is a cool inside tip for early success.

6.) When “everyone” is selected, others may see your data regardless of whether or not you are friends.  Reciprocally, users should uncheck if they want to exclude their profile from wider Facebook SERPs. It would not be surprising if users protest when folks start to discover that all of a sudden some of their personal sharing is visible to everyone.

7.) Remember that it’s not only wider (non-friends) Facebook search that matters. Your friends, friends of friends, networks and networks of friends are likely to trust you a bit more since you’re “local.” It’s fascinating to extrapolate the implications of a “trusted local personal search network.” As a user or searcher, be aware of how Facebook search privacy settings function.

8.) Seek advice from other tools Facebook gives us regarding users common social graphs. Lexicon, which is about to get deeper, and the Facebook paid search platform offer cool insight regarding what’s hot.

9.) Contribute continually. A good portion of the physical search results are comprised of social graph points generated within the last 30 days.

10.) Be there or be square! Stay tuned for attributes, in and out of Facebook, may factor in the search results as Facebook evolves.

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Google’s co-founders want search to be real fast, really fast!  And one way they can influence the overall speed of the internet is to make sure faster web pages rank better than slower ones in the Google search results forcing webmasters to improve site speed or lose rankings!

Before we get too excited, keep in mind that there are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and each are weighted differently.  So, it is unclear how important this algorithm change might be…..however, we feel that when Google provides us a ‘hint’ to improving rankings, we should pay attention.

Here are some initial techniques & best practices to improve your Website Speed:

Compress Images & Text
Image compression is minimizing the size in bytes of a graphics file without degrading the quality of the image to an unacceptable level. The reduction in file size reduces the time required for images to be sent over the Internet or downloaded from Web page thus improving the performance of the site.  In image compression, a small loss in quality is usually not noticeable.

There is no “critical point” up to which compression works perfectly, but beyond which it becomes impossible.  Every image that has not gone through image compression should do so.  Here is a link to quite a few free online tools that allow you to compress images for free. http://www.dailyseoblog.com/2009/07/10-image-optimization-tools-to-help-reduce-image-file-sizes-page-load-time/

Limit Requests
Make as few requests as possible (consolidate JS & CSS) – Every time you call a .js file or a .css file from your web page you are making a request from the server.  Every time you have to wait for the server to respond and provide you will the information you requested.

Combine Script Calls
It would be must more efficient if we combined all of our calls for .js into one file and only called the server once for this information and it would also keep this extra load off of the server.  So the takeaway is to combine all of your .js files into one file include so that you only make 1 call to the server and speed up performance.  Same goes for .css files also.

Use Caching
Use Caching when possible for pages and images – Caching is the temporary storage of frequently accessed pages/images in higher speed media (typically SRAM or RAM) for more efficient retrieval. Web caching stores frequently used objects closer to the client through browser, proxy, or server caches. By storing “fresh” objects closer to your users, you avoid round trips to the origin server, reducing bandwidth consumption, server load, and most importantly, latency.

Caching is not just for static sites, even dynamic sites can benefit from caching. Graphics and multimedia typically don’t change as frequently as (X)HTML files. Graphics that seldom change like logos, headers, and navigation can be given longer expiration. Depending on the server type the setting are different but all servers have the ability to set up caching for the most frequent pages and images.

Cut Down Connections
Make as few connections to other domains as possible – Calling 3rd party domains from your pages can slow down your load time dramatically.  It is very hard to control the speed at which the information is being set back to you and can slow down your sites response rate.  Make as few calls to other sites as possible and make sure you want the speed at which they are delivering your information back to you.

Remove Bad Connections
Any time a connection hangs, does not respond or throws a 3xx error search engines see this as poor website design and could see this as a negative against your site.  Just like 400 or 300 errors that are not handled properly we need to make sure our connections are just as clean.

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