Archive for the ‘Gadgets’ Category
Appreciating the Value of Outbound Links
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
Webmasters continually fail to appreciate the value of outbound links from their website and their effect on search engine rankings. You don’t have to leave it entirely to a SEO company to understand what is needed to help you boost the significance of those outbound links.
One of the most obvious ways that outbound links can have some effect on website optimising is through anchor text. Both outbound and inbound links’ anchor text has the same sort of effect on the search engines’ rankings. Of the two different sources inbound links’ anchor text no doubt has the greatest weighting when it comes to search engine rankings. For example if the term “vague sentence” appears in the inbound anchor text linked to your web page then that whole term will get a mention in SERP’s even if neither the keyword “vague” or the keyword “sentence” happened to have appeared in any of your web pages.
The anchor text of outbound links acts in the same sort of way although as stated already doesn’t have quite the same weighting as inbound links’ anchor text. A specific keyword in the anchor text of a webpage link can result in that particular webpage showing up in the search engine results even when it is the only place that it appears and even if there are no inbound links for that particular anchor text.
If you are not sure whether this is a valid argument or not have a look at your own website traffic logs. Locate the search engine traffic to specific pages on your site. You are most likely to find a lot of traffic for search strings that have originated in the anchor text of your own outbound links.
Listed below are three things you should or should not do when it comes to putting links on your site.
Don’t just limit your website links to your own site or at best to the web designer or your web host. Make sure there are relevant links to other sites. You will find that this is a fairly widespread fault amongst a lot of commercial websites. Search engine algorithms find it hard to take these sites too seriously when the only links are to pages within the site itself.
Make sure that you have links to other web sites that have relevance to your own. If your own website has any real value, then of course it will have extra links to other sites that have real value too. This is recognised by the search engines and informative inclusive sites get the nod ahead of sites that are simply blowing their own trumpet.
Don’t include links that have no relevance to your website. If for instance you have an online business that sells gardening equipment, there’s not a lot of point in putting links on your homepage to rental villas in the Costa Del Sol! What happens if you do something like this is that the search engine algorithm gets a little stumped and decides to put the whole website well off the rankings. There are plenty of websites that make a case for either rental villas in the Costa del Sol or for gardening supplies in England, so it might as well treat them with more seriousness!
WordPress Websites Are Great!
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
It is common practice in 2011 to use WordPress templates for web design as they are quite user friendly. The information on the website doesn’t need to be put through any alterations because the templates have a specific data base which runs the CMS. The templates themselves can be quite easily altered while the actual information on the website stays the same. The appearance of the website can be altered which often gives more appeal than the same old website day in and day out. A new face may mean you have something new to offer.
Individuals, who have been utilising the MS front page, will know just how easy it is to alter templates. These templates have a database included which assists in the maintenance of the information on the website. In the past when individuals went about changing the appearance of the website they had to bring it back into line all over again and this was a lot of hassle. But now with these Word Press templates people can change the outlook without even worrying about losing their content.
Sometimes when you choose to change the look of your website, adding a new template can also add certain additional functions to the website which you can use and ensure the job is done with greater ease. It is all so easy to do and you only have to log into your Word Press and alter the template by use of the administration panel. There are quite a number of different forms of Word Press that have now been made accessible and with the recent publishing of Word Press 3.0, there are a number of new themes and facilities which individuals are able to access and use. Some of the new accessible features that have been introduced are different plugging for Face book or Twitter. Along with this, you can apply any plug-in you wish and these can be added to any of the Word Press topics. With advancing technology, new templates are being developed with user friendly options for these plugins and individuals don’t have to make any additions.
Most of the Word Press templates which are of reasonable quality can be found freely available on the World Wide Web and it is a good opening for individuals to make known their products to potential customers if they do not have the money to invest on more recently developed web products. This is the best aspect of the Word Press templates. Individuals can quite easily look for a template in relation to their needs and commence work on it. Individuals can access free templates on the official Word Press website. Alternatively, many other websites also have on offer free Word Press templates. If it is now the time to start showcasing your product on the internet, go out and find a free Word Press template and begin using it and enjoy the benefits you will get.
How Video Can Help With SEO
Monday, August 8th, 2011
It is still up for debate if video helps with SEO but there are some SEO companies out there who will tell you it most definitely does. Google themselves have advised people to add videos to their websites, so it definitely cannot hurt. As SEO or search engine optimisation is a standard feature of most websites all owners should install video to get ahead of the rest. As most search engine optimisation (SEO) professionals are aware, getting a first page Google result is much harder than it has ever been. Google’s search and indexing algorithms endeavour to increase in complexity, but Google has handed over more and more of its search results to “blended” search results which are displaying videos and images. These blended websites are increasingly becoming leaders in the top of the page of search engines. As a result the traditional web results which are normally competed for top rankings have been wiped out. Problems that might be appearing for some traditionally high ranking websites mean there are opportunities open to them as well, as they can now become video rich to reestablish their high rankings. Research has indicated that videos were fifty three times more likely than traditional web pages to receive a first-page ranking. To start your march up the rankings you need video content. This doesn’t need to be actual video footage but slide shows, Power Points and screen captures. These have to be supported by titles and meta data as Google cannot actually see inside the content but relies upon the tags and titles. Because the web crawlers can’t see inside videos you have to post your video to Google using a Video Sitemap.
This has similarities with an XML sitemap but is specially designed for video. The submission is done through Google’s webmaster tools. The most commonly made error in Video SEO is to think that because you have sent the web page on which a video has been placed, that the video content is being indexed. But you will have to have a robots.txt file on all the video pages so that Google can recognise where your video has been placed. When it comes to ranking time Google firstly finds any match that exists between the title and the keyword search. The preferable tie is when the title tag matches the title of the video. Using traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important feature for Google in making a decision about its ranking. Google also looks at things like the number of pages already on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links come from However, when it comes to Video SEO it is a different ball game.
New sites are able to compete with the more established ones using SEO video and small sites have a good competitive strength with larger ones. As time marches on, Google’s finding and indexing of video content will without a doubt become more pronounced, and hand in hand with this will be stiffer competition for video results. It will without a doubt become stiffer for sites to achieve high rankings. However, at the moment the number of web pages still far outnumbers indexed video assets, and while this continues, web publishers will have the chance to leap to the top of Google’s search results through the use of Video SEO.
The Amazing Google Wallet!
Monday, June 13th, 2011Google has made a huge move by launching technology which will mean we will no longer have to worry about our wallets bulging out of our back pockets, filled to the brim with all the necessary credit cards and store discount cards. In fact we won’t even have to bring our wallets out of the home ever again.
The main characteristic of Google Wallet is the transferring of the features of a wallet to your phone, which is termed a mobile app. With this new facility it will be possible to store all the cards you own onto your mobile phone. This could include credit cards, debit cards and shoppers’ cards issued by retailers. Once goods are selected in a retail store and then taken to the check out, all the buyer has to do is wave the mobile phone, with all the necessary data in it, in front of a NFC reader installed at the checkout. This Near Field Communication Reader instantly picks up the information stored on the phone and it is transferred to the checkout register. If there are any in-store sales offers on then these will be picked up by the mobile app. With a simple tap of the phone.
The question of security does not seem to be an issue as the app will have its own unique PIN number. Also, the NFC aerial in the phone only becomes activated when the screen of the phone appears and then no transactions can take place until the PIN number has been keyed in.
Co-operation from the bank or financial institution is required as they have to allow the credit or debit card to be installed on the NFC enabled phone. A NFC- enabled phone has a payment application for a credit or debit card which is issued and approved by the consumer’s financial institution and then installed on the phone. The application and encrypted information are located in the most secure place on the phone. The retailer has a POS enabled device that reads the card information and relays it to the specific bank which, as occurs with any electronic transaction, will allow the transaction to go through.
Google Wallet intends to offer two ways of paying for goods: using a Pay Pass eligible Citi MasterCard and a Google Prepaid card. By coming to an agreement with MasterCard, anyone with a Google Wallet app. Will be able to pay at any retailers’ checkout facility which accepts MasterCard Pay Pass. This will simplify the process for retailers as well as consumers. This whole process of payment for goods is made incredibly easy as consumers will only have to carry a mobile phone around with them, which most people do anyway, and leave the old bulging wallet at home or put it in the rubbish bin – a now obsolete item which will not even be recyclable as there will be no demand. Even the most expensive crocodile skin wallet could find its way to landfill.
Mobile phone payments are not entirely new but by 2014 it is predicted that payments made in this way will total approximately $1billion. However, there is still no firm indication that we are about to reach the age of a cashless society – even with Google Wallet.
