Highlights and Limitations of Bing Keyword Research Tool
Bing Webmaster Tools lately launched an organic keyword research tool with up to six months of historical data available.SEOs will no longer be restricted to the last 30 days of data from “other tools”. More significantly, this is ideal for long tail keyword research, as the data is based completely off of organic information and not paid data.
Highlights of Bing Keyword Research Tool:
Here are some of the highlights of what you get from the new Bing Keyword Tool:
•Key phrase research based off of organic queries.
•Actual numbers, with no rounding or averaging.
•Universal volume, or drill down by country.
•Six months of past data you can mine through custom date ranges.
•Export to .CSV.
•Language Filter.
•Past 25 searches are saved to your history.
Limitations of Bing Keyword Research Tool:
However there are some limitations of the tool which include:
•You can search just one phrase at a time.
•Limits results to 100 phrases.
•The trend graph close to each result is basically just a line with some arbitrary dots on it that isn’t very helpful at all.
•Limited to either universal results or a single country. If you need multiple countries, you must do them one at a time.
Google’s Street View Captures The Cities Of Israel
Google has launched its popular Street View service in the country’s three largest cities subsequent to months of consultations with Israeli security officials.
The new Street View offers images of everyday life, contested areas and religious sites in the Holy Land. Due to security issues, areas around numerous sensitive sites, such as the military headquarters in Tel Aviv and the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, are blurred out.
Google Street View is accessible in more than 30 countries. It was held up in Israel by concerns that images of its streets could be utilized by terrorists. Last August, after a panel of government ministers met for six months to draft security guidelines, Israel divulged it had reached an agreement with Google.
The service was silently launched late last week and officially unveiled Sunday. The images are obtained by specialized cameras located on vehicles.
Israel is the foremost Middle Eastern nation to display its cities and streets online. Iraq’s National Museum can also be seen on Street View.
The street view captured images of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and various tourist attractions.
Google Plus Revamped With Supplementary Features
In its attempt to revamp all its products, Google introduces a more functional and flexible version of Google+. Most importantly, Google has accelerated their efforts to create a simpler and a better Google plus.
The major highlights include:
- A custom-made side bar
- There are ‘conversation cards’ now. This is the new format of your discussion stream and assists a better view of the current conversation.
- Keen to know what is going on in a conversation, head to the “activity drawer” of the ‘conversation cards’
- Hangouts have supplementary features like rotating billboard of cool Hangouts
Google has stated that Google+ update extends ahead of navigation, the stream and hangouts. For instance: there’s a new Explore page that shows what’s appealing and trending across the network. And a new profile with much larger photos. And a fresh chat list that puts your friends front and center. And much more.
Google And Microsoft’s Fresh Combat Zone:Your Living Room
Microsoft and Google aren’t going to confront each other just over Internet search, office efficiency suites and cloud-based applications and services. Their next looming battle is over who will own the living room, and the outcome will have astonishing implications for IT as well.
In February, news revealed regarding a new service and device has been working on that will stream music all through a home using Google’s cloud-based music service and Google-branded, wireless enabled speakers. The news also divulged that the device has been in development for a year. Music is just Google’s first target; eventually the service is expected to include streaming video as well. And even that represents just the commencement of Google’s ambitions in the home. A person connected with the project revealed that Google wants ultimately to control all gadgets in the home – televisions, speakers, even light bulbs — and link them to the Internet.
Microsoft has analogous ambitions. In a blog post lately, Frank X. Shaw, a Microsoft corporate communications executive, laid out a vision of a world in which people would use Microsoft’s Kinect, Xbox and Bing to interact with TV and entertainment devices via signs and voice. Xbox by now streams music and video, so Microsoft is there before Google. It’s also clear that Microsoft’s ambitions go beyond the living room, just as Google’s do.
The battle here is about much more than selling devices like the Xbox or Google’s upcoming streaming-music device. Both companies eventually want you to live in their cloud. They don’t want you to only store your music there; they need information about your entire life there. If they’re going to manage your lights and use of electricity, they call for information about when you want your lights regularly turned on and off, for example. If they’re going to take charge of your television, they’ll need to be familiar with what types of shows you like to watch so they can make suggestions for new shows and record your favorites when you’re otherwise engaged. And they’ll accumulate all that information, all along with your music, personal documents and more, in your personal cloud.
What does this got to do with IT and the enterprise? More than one can expect. The enduring consumerisation of IT shows that there’s no longer a clear line connecting personal and professional use of technology. If people use an iPad at home, they’re also going to utilize it at work, and not only for playing games. So they look forward to support for issues such as how to access company email and networks on their iPad. And when people are storing their music and personal information in their clouds with Microsoft and Google, that line connecting work and home will become even fuzzier and more noteworthy. You can expect people mixing personal and professional information in those vendors’ clouds.
Google Bot Needs To Crawl Css And Javascript Files
Lately Matt Cutts, who works for the Search Quality group of Google, specializing in SEO issues and also the head of Google’s Web spam team spoke on a significant issue in a video.He has asked site owners, webmasters as well as search engine optimization professionals to ‘not’ block the GoogleBot from accessing their CSS and JavaScript files.
According to Matt Cutts, this ‘unblocking’ is essential to permit Google to crawl better and to judge your site better. This will ultimately help them show better search results to the user.
Google Launches Panda 3.4
Google confirmed that it had rolled out Panda 3.4 on Friday in its official Twitter Account. This is the newest iteration of the algorithm focused on improving search results by plummeting the rankings of websites with low-quality content.
According to sources from the company, less than 1.6 percent of all search queries will be affected by the Panda 3.4 updates. In the past couple of months, Google has rolled out a series of trivial adjustments to Panda to make certain that the algorithm is performing effectively in terms of bringing users the best results.
Scores of people thought the next update from Google would be more comprehensive and major changes could come for Panda in the near future. The reason for tittle-tattle is a recent announcement from Google’s Matt Cutts that discussed potential changes to search. Among these adjustments was a deliberate effort to target “overly SEO’d” websites.
While SEO is a good way for a company to enhance its appeal to search crawlers, new best practices mandate that marketers focus on the development of quality content to drive search rankings.
Steps to Preserving SEO While Redesigning A Website…Contd
- Do delete the old site if your new site is on the same host. One never knows how the search bots find it, but having a “/old-site directory” or similar is just by no means a good thing. In spite of 301 redirects and all the essential precautions, having your complete old site crawlable and accessible for bots or users is just a bad scene. Back it up locally or store it in a private folder on your web server.
- Don’t fail to remember to migrate all of your optimized title tags and meta descriptions from the old site. If your homepage had some fine keywords in the title tag that was driving you precious traffic, the last thing you want is your new homepage title tag to be simply “homepage.” Even if that gets indexed as such for only one day, it could take weeks to regain your valuable rankings and traffic from that kind of slip.
- Do have an XML sitemap once you introduce a new site. Remove the old one from webmaster tools as well as from the actual live server. After that install the new one after you’ve got the site live and add it to Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Central.
- Don’t overlook to install Google Analytics. If you had it on your old site, carry it over; avoid creating a new account. You don’t want to miss out on traffic statistics, particularly for a new site launch. Forgetting your Analytics snippet is common with site redesigns — but it could leave you blind to traffic and conversions at a vital stage.
- Do monitor Webmaster Tools crawl rates and other errors to make sure that you’ve covered your bases and that nothing strange is going on once you launch.
Google Tips Free Web Hosting Services
Spamming the web is something which is very common today. Even though people have worked out solutions like captcha for it, the problem doesn’t seem to get solved. Google have indicated that it will be strict on spamming and has shared some useful tips to combat spamming.
There are a number of free hosting services online and they all stand a serious risk of getting punished by Google, if they fail to counter spam on their websites. Google shares on tips useful to avoid spam on free hosting sites on the Google webmaster central blog.
Like 7 wonders, Google states 7 blunders to be taken care of by free hosting websites
- Not having an abuse policy
- Not having captcha or other verification tools for forms
- Not monitoring site for spammy keywords, large amount of JavaScript and other spam signal like redirection.
- Not keeping a record of user data like signups from the same ip address, form completion time and other data tracking useful to counter spam
- Not keeping track of your webserver log files
- Not monitoring your free web hosting service for phishing and malware
- Not having sanity checks like monitoring a polish free web hosting service for thousands of new and legitimate sites created overnight
Finally Google also asks free web hosting service providers to monitor for sudden activity spikes that may indicate a spam attack in progress. The last word from the Google webmaster central blog is to register the site on Google webmaster tools so that the site can be monitored and alerts can be notified.
The web today consists of a plethora of free web hosting services and it’s necessary to monitor our websites regularly to protect them from spam. These 7 blunders should be taken seriously by all free hosting services and sites. To ensure that your free hosting or site is not in any of these problems comply with these standards and enjoy your Google ranking.
Steps to Preserving SEO While Redesigning A Website
It’s probable that your business will call for a total website redesign at some point. If search engine optimization (SEO) is responsible for driving a considerable amount of your business’ revenue, your redesign process may cause your company to lose your search engine rankings. This could be destructive and could even put you out of business.
The following is a listing of vital do’s and don’ts for preserving your SEO when redesigning your website:
- Don’t modify your URL structure. If you are going to redesign, do your best to keep your URLs the same.
- Do a 301 redirect for all old pages to correspond to new pages. A 301 redirect informs the search engines that you’ve permanently moved a page from one location to another. This is so that when your site comes up in the search engine results, people aren’t taken to a broken page.
- Don’t have two versions of your complete site. Try going to your site with www and without (http://sitename.com and http://www.sitename.com). If you can get to both and your browser doesn’t mechanically redirect one of them to the other, you have what is called a canonical issue.
- Do have a robots.txt installed. This tells the search engine “bots” what has to be done. It’s a fine idea to block out all the /admin, /dev, and any other directories or subdomains that you don’t want to be indexed by the search engines. Having ineffective, private, and duplicate pages indexed can weaken the strength of your entire domain.They are also very difficult to remove once indexed than blocking them out in the first place.
- Don’t overload on truly heavy graphic elements; page-load speed is known to have an outcome on your SEO. However small, you don’t want users or search bots to get annoyed downloading each page. Compress your graphics, clean up your code and keep it quick.
(More Tips…To be continued next week)
Gmail Accused of Misusing User Data
Gmail account is something indispensable for the majority of us and it will be a fact hard to digest that Google have been accused of sending emails to our contacts without our permissions. We can see questions raised by agitated Gmail account holders at the Google support forum.
The complaint from the users is Google is using their contacts to promote their own products. The user can see that mails are being sent to his contacts without a Gmail account to open a new Gmail account. This seems to be seriously irritating a number of users who feel that this is a breach into their privacy. You can see frustrated comments from the users like
‘Not happy Google’
‘Outrageous’
‘PLEASE EXPLAIN AND STOP THIS GOOGLE. Or I for one will close my account.’
The customers of Google service are really disappointed about this development, having said that they also seem to have lost trust and seriously considering other options. It’s a pity that Google forgot to mention about this in their recent privacy policy that’s all one can feel right. Yes and the Google employees were quick in their reply in the support forum as a user put it “Thanks for finally clearing this up, even if it did take over three months and a cNet article to get a response. :)”
What did Google say?
The reply came from Google employee Sarah the Gmail community manager and she puts it simple “These emails are generally sent when you invite a non-Gmail user to chat with you — I’ve attached a help article below.”
Maybe Google took 3 months to prepare the help article after all they are the company that cares a lot for their customers. Hard to believe? Check your emails 