Monday, October 14, 2013

How to Build a Website

How to Build a Website Step 1 - Hosting :

Hosting is where you put your website and all the Web pages. While it's possible to build a website on your personal computer and never move it online, it's somewhat pointless. No one but you will ever be able to see it. So the first thing you'll want to do is find a Web hosting provider.

There are several types of Web hosting options you can choose from
Most people gravitate to free Web hosting without too much thought, but there can be drawbacks to free hosting. You don't always get as much space, you might be required to run their ads on your site, or there may be bandwidth limits. Be sure to read all the fine print before you put your website on a free Web host. I recommend using free hosting providers for testing Web pages and for personal pages.

How to Build a Website Step 2 - Do You Need a Domain Name?:

You don't need a domain name to put up a website. You can put up a site on free hosting or even paid hosting plans without a domain name. A domain name provides extra branding for your site and makes it easier for people to remember the URL. But domain names cost money, typically between $8 and $35 a year.
You don't need a domain name to put up a website. You can put up a site on free hosting or even paid hosting plans without a domain name. A domain name provides extra branding for your site and makes it easier for people to remember the URL. But domain names cost money, typically between $8 and $35 a year.

How to Build a Website Step 3 - Plan Your Website:

Once you've gotten a domain and decided on your URL, you can start planning your site. You need to decide:
  • Type of site - Most websites are either news/information, product, or reference sites. As such they each have a slightly different focus.
  • Navigation - The navigation affects the information architecture of your site.
  • Content - Content is the actual pages you'll be building.
If you can recognize page types, you'll be able to recognize what types of pages you need for your site. Play the Web Page Types game.

How to Build a Website Step 4 - Build Your Website Page by Page:

Building a website requires that you work on one page at a time. To build your site you should be familiar with:
  • Design Basics - The elements of good design and and how to use it on websites.
  • Learning HTML - HTML is the building block of a Web page. While it's not absolutely required, you'll do better if you learn HTML than if you don't.
  • Learning CSS - CSS is the building block of how pages look. And learning CSS will make it easier for you to change your site's look when you need to.
  • Web Page Editors - Finding the perfect editor for your needs will help you learn design, HTML, and CSS.

How to Build a Website Step 5 - Publish Your Website:

Publishing your website is a matter of getting the pages you created in step 4 up to the hosting provider you set up in step 1. You can do this with either the tools that come with your hosting service or with FTP clients. Knowing which you can use depends upon your hosting provider. Contact them if you are not sure.

How to Build a Website Step 6 - Promote Your Website:

The easiest way to promote your website is through search engine optimization or SEO. You build your Web content so that it ranks well in search engines. This can be very difficult, but it is inexpensive and can result in good results if you work at it.
Other ways to promote your site include: word of mouth, email, and advertising. You should include your URL on all professional correspondence and whenever it makes sense in personal messages. I put my URL in my email signature along with my email address.

How to Build a Website Step 7 - Maintain Your Website:

Maintenance can be the most boring part of website design, but in order to keep your site going well and looking good, you need to do it. Testing your site as you're building it and then after it's been live for a while is important. And you should also work on content development on a regular basis.

HTML References / Web Design References
HTML Tutorials / Web Design Tutorials / CSS Tutorials
Editing Websites / Managing Websites
Related Articles
For More Info about How to Build a Website


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Friday, October 11, 2013

Facebook privacy : Users should check these settings as new changes roll out

Facebook users may be wary after hearing that the social network is following up on a promise to cut a privacy setting that kept user names out of the social network’s graph search.

Here’s a quick guide to what changes are coming and which settings to review as they hit users’ accounts.

What’s disappearing?  - The social network announced in December that it was retiring the option for users to control whether they show up when others type their name into the search bar, but said Thursday that it would finally be notifying those who use it that the setting will be removed. The option, which shows up in privacy settings as “Who can look up your timeline by name?” was already cut for people who weren’t using it.

How was that setting useful? -  It wasn’t perfect. It would not have stopped, for example, Facebook users from being able to access those protected profiles if those users had been tagged in a public post or picture. Still, it did help those users to keep a lower profile on the social network, such as those trying to hide their profiles from abusive ex-partners or harassment.

For those who chose that option— a “small percentage” of its users, Facebook says -- the change now allows anyone to type those names into Facebook’s search engines to see their profiles.

Can I replicate that option with other tools? -  No. The main feature of the setting was that people wouldn’t be able to find a user by name in the search bar. There appears to be no way to keep that function. But there are still some setting that can lower a profile on the site.

Facebook is trying to encourage people to control their privacy on an item-by-item basis. So, whenever and however you post, you should be checking to see if what you’re putting up is for public view or just for friends or specific lists of friends. Also, consider turning on Timeline approval, which shows you what your friends may be posting about your location or whom you’re with. You can ask them to remove your name from those posts. Facebook has settings that let you review posts and photo tags before they’re posted to your Timeline. If privacy is a major concern, use these tools and don’t hesitate to ask other users to remove posts about you that make you uncomfortable.

It’s also a good idea to create group lists of friends so that you can share some posts exclusively with certain lists and exclude other groups from seeing those posts. That’s particularly important if you spend a lot of time on Facebook’s mobile app, where privacy tools can be harder to finesse.

What else can I do for privacy? -  Another key option in the privacy settings menu is one lets users disable your search engines from linking to their timelines. That will at least cut down on the chance that someone looking for you outside the social network will be able to find your profile.

If your whereabouts or similar information are sensitive, particularly if it’s a safety issue, you should be very aware of locations on your posts — no check-ins — and be careful about writing posts that give clues about where you are.

Users should also remember that they can also always block specific users from seeing their Facebook page or from contacting them, but this is more of a reactive step than a proactive one. Plus, just as you could alter your name (yes, in violation of Facebook’s guidelines) to hide your identity, so could anyone who is looking for you.

If you’re concerned about past posts, Facebook has a setting that lets you limit the audience for posts and information that are already on your profile. You can also go to the “Activity Log” on your timeline to get an action-by-action view of how your activity shows up on the site.

And finally, as Facebook itself makes clear, remember that “things you hide from your timeline still appear in news feed, search and other places on Facebook.” There include some things you just can’t hide, namely profile pictures and cover photos, but also some news feed activity.

There’s been much discussion over how much social networks should expect users to fine-tune their settings in order to hit the levels of privacy that they want. Facebook has been evolving its settings to be more granular — which can be good for thinking about privacy at a more real-time pace. But it also means that it requires those for whom privacy is a major concern to set broader controls.

For More Info about Facebook privacy


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Monday, October 07, 2013

No More PageRank Updates This Year

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said on Twitter yesterday that Google won’t be pushing out a new Google Toolbar PageRank update this year.

Niels Bosch asked on Twitter if we should expect an update to PageRank before 2014. In response to that, Matt Cutts said, “I would be surprised if that happened.”

It has now been 8 months since the last Google Toolbar PageRank update. In fact, the last update was on February 4, 2013 and honestly, I think PageRank is finally dead – at least the Toolbar PageRank.

I’d be surprised if there was another Toolbar PageRank update ever. Maybe Google will do one next year and then let it quietly go away forever.

Over the years, support for PageRank has dropped. Google never offered a Google Toolbar for Chrome or any add-on to show PageRank values. Google dropped the Google Toolbar for Firefox in June 2011. Internet Explorer is the last browser to still have a PageRank display offered by Google, but the data that flows into that display hasn’t been updated for over six months.

When we asked Google two months ago about when the next update would come, Google had no comment.

Earlier this year, Google said that PageRank in the toolbar wouldn’t be going away:



Update: This afternoon, Matt Cutts posted this timely video on PageRank:



For more on this, topic, check out our Google PageRank Guide.

For more info about No More PageRank Updates This Year


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The Penguin 2.1 Spam-Filtering Algorithm


The fifth confirmed release of Google’s “Penguin” spam fighting algorithm is live. That makes it Penguin 5 by our count. But since this Penguin update is using a slightly improved version of Google’s “Penguin 2″ second-generation technology, Google itself is calling it “Penguin 2.1.” Don’t worry. We’ll explain the numbering nonsense below, as well as what this all means for publishers.

Previous Updates

Here are all the confirmed releases of Penguin to date:
  • Penguin 1 on April 24, 2012 (impacting around 3.1% of queries)
  • Penguin 2 on May 26, 2012 (impacting less than 0.1%)
  • Penguin 3 on October 5, 2012 (impacting around 0.3% of queries)
  • Penguin 4 (AKA Penguin 2.0) on May 22, 2013 (impacting 2.3% of queries)
  • Penguin 5 (AKA Penguin 2.1) on Oct. 4, 2013 (impacting around 1% of queries)

Why Penguin 2.1 AND Penguin 5?

If us talking about Penguin 5 in reference to something Google is calling Penguin 2.1 hurts your head, believe us, it hurts ours, too. But you can pin that blame back on Google. Here’s why.
When Google started releasing its “Panda” algorithm designed to fight low-quality content, it called the first one simply “Panda.” So when the second came out, people referred to that as “Panda 2.” When the third came out, people called that Panda 3 — causing Google to say that the third release, because it was relatively minor, really only should be called Panda 2.1 — the “point” being used to indicate how much a minor change it was.
Google eventually — and belatedly — indicated that a Panda 3 release happened, causing the numbering to move into Panda 3.0, Panda 3.1 and so on until there had been so many “minor” updates that we having to resort to going further out in decimal places to things like Panda 3.92.
That caused us here at Search Engine Land to decide it would be easier all around if we just numbered any confirmed update sequentially, in order of when they came. No matter how “big” or “small” an update might be, we’d just give it the next number on the list: Penguin 1, Penguin 2, Penguin 3 and so on.
That worked out fine until Penguin 4, because Google typically didn’t give these updates numbers itself. It just said there was an update, and left it to us or others to attach a number to it.
But when Penguin 4 arrived, Google really wanted to stress that it was using what it deemed to be a major, next-generation change in how Penguin works. So, Google called it Penguin 2, despite all the references to a Penguin 2 already being out there, despite the fact it hadn’t really numbered many of these various updates before.
Today’s update, as can be seen above, has been dubbed Penguin 2.1 — so supposedly, it’s a relatively minor change to the previous Penguin filter that was being used. However, if it’s impacting around 1 percent of queries as Google says, that means it is more significant than what Google might have considered to be similar “minor” updates of Penguin 1.1 and Penguin 1.2.
What Is Penguin Again? And How Do I Deal With It?
For those new to the whole “Penguin” concept, Penguin is a part of Google’s overall search algorithm that periodically looks for sites that are deemed to be spamming Google’s search results but somehow still ranking well. In particular, it goes after sites that may have purchased paid links.
If you were hit by Penguin, you’ll likely know if you see a marked drop in traffic that begins today or tomorrow. To recover, you’ll need to do things like disavow bad links or manually have those removed. Filing a reconsideration request doesn’t help, because Penguin is an automated process. Until it sees that what it considers to be bad has been removed, you don’t recover.
If you were previously hit by Penguin and have taken actions hopefully meant to fix that, today and tomorrow are the days to watch. If you see an improvement in traffic, that’s a sign that you’ve escaped Penguin.
Here are previous articles with more on Penguin recovery and how it and other filters work as part of the ranking system

What About Hummingbird?

If you’re wondering about how Penguin fits into that new Google Hummingbird algorithm  you may have heard about, think of Penguin as a part of Hummingbird, not as a replacement for it.

Hummingbird is like Google’s entire ranking engine, whereas Penguin is like a small part of that engine, a filter that is removed and periodically replaced with what Google considers to be a better filter to help keep out bad stuff.



Tags : Penguin 2.1, Penguin 2.1 Spam-Filtering Algorithm, hummingbird algorithm, google algorithm updates, google algorithm, nilesh patel, seo services provider, best information of the world,  nilesh patel forum,  fans of photography,  nilesh patel seo

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Thursday, October 03, 2013

DEFINITIONS

What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an internet marketing concept whereby you improve your Web site's design and content to achieve higher rankings in search engines. Search engine optimization is also known as search engine positioning and search engine placement

What is Satisficing? 
Satisficing is a cross between 'satisfying' and 'sufficing.' It refers to the fact that when human beings are presented with numerous choices, we usually select the first reasonable option, rather than the best option available.

What is Scalability?
Scalability is the ability of a computer application or product (hardware or software) to continue to function well as it (or its context) is changed in size or volume in order to meet a user need.

What is a Screensaver?
A screensaver is a program or animated image that is activated on a personal computer display when no user activity has been sensed for a certain time.

What is a Search Engine?
A search engine a set of programs that includes:
  • a spider (crawler, bot or robot) that crawls the Internet retrieving Web documents that want to be searchable, then follows hypertext links to retrieve other Web documents;
  • a program that creates an index from the documents retrieved by the spider; and
  • a program that receives your search request, compares it to the entries in the index, and returns results to you.
What is Search Engine Ranking?
Search engine ranking is a measure of a Web site's visibility in a search engine.

What is Search Engine Submission?
Search engine submission or registration is the act of registering a site with the search engines, so that it is searchable by search engine users.

What is a Search Term?
A search term or search phrase is a word or phrase that people enter into search engine and Web directory search forms.

What is Section 508?
Section 508 is a federal mandate requiring that information technology be made accessible to people with disabilities. Much of Section 508 compliance concerns making Web sites, intranets, and web-enabled applications accessible.

What is a Secure Server?
A secure server is a web server that uses encryption technology to prevent non-authorized users from intercepting and reading sensitive messages sent via the Internet.

What is Sell Through Rate
Sell through rate is the percentage of ad inventory sold, excluding traded or bartered inventory.

What is SERPs?
SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) is the list of search results returned by a search engine or web directory in response to a search query.

What is a Server?
A server is a computer program that provides services to other computer programs in the same or other computers. For example, email, FTP, Usenet, and HTTP connections.

What is a Session Cookie?
A session cookie is a temporary cookie placed into a computerÂ’s RAM for use during the user's visit to the Web site. When the user exits the site, the cookie is removed.

What is Settlement?
Settlement is the process by which a merchant and a cardholder exchange financial data resulting from a transaction.

What is SFA?
SFA (Sales Force Automation) is a means of increasing your sales team's efficiency and effectiveness using technology to help automate, organize and track the sales process.

What is Shareware?
Shareware is software that is distributed free, on a trial basis, with the understanding that the user pays a fee if they decide to keep using it. Sometimes shareware programs are 'lite' versions of a program with certain functions disabled as an enticement to buy the complete version of the program.

What is Shockwave?
Macromedia's Shockwave is a program for viewing interactive media on the Web.

What is a Shopping Cart?
A shopping cart is an interactive online catalog where a user can view, add and remove items to and from a cart. 

What is a Signature?
A signature or sig file is a short block of text at the end of emails, often used as virtual business cards. 

What is Signed Volume?
Signed volume is projected annual volume in sales for a new merchant. This figure is used to track the risk of a merchant account. 

What is a Site Map?
A site map or sitemap is a visual model of a Web site's content that allows the users to navigate through the site to find the information they are looking for. Typically, site maps are organized hierarchically, breaking down the Web site's information into increasingly specific subject areas. 

What is Site Popularity?
Site popularity refers to click through popularity, and how long visitors remain at the site after getting there.

What is Site Search?
Site search is a search engine or application that searches a single web site, as opposed to the whole World Wide Web.

What is a Skyscraper Ad?
A skyscraper ad is a tall online banner ad, usually displayed at the side of a page. Dimensions include skyscraper (120 x 600 pixels) and wide skyscraper (160 x 600 pixels).

What is a SLA?
A SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a commitment to a merchant by the merchant account provider for delivery of services.

What is SLD?
SLD (Second-Level Domain) is the portion of an Internet address that identifies the specific and unique administrative owner associated with an IP address. The second-level domain name includes the TLD (top-level domain) name. For example, in ECommerce-Dictionary.com, 'ECommerce-Dictionary' is a second-level domain. 'ECommerce-Dictionary.com' is a second-level domain name and includes the top-level domain name of 'com.

What is a Slotting Fee?
A slotting fee is a fee charged by sites to advertisers for premium ad positions on their site.

What is SMTP?
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is a method by which computers use to send and receive email.

What is Sniffer?
Sniffer is a software program that detects user's browser capabilities, such as bandwidth, JavaScript, plugins and screen resolution.

What is SOHO?
SOHO (Small Office Home Office) is a term used for the small office or home office environment.

What is Spam?
Spam is typically used to refer to unsolicited junk email on the Internet. Historically means an electronic message which is sent to a large group of people when such messages are prohibited or discouraged.

What is a Spider?
A spider (also known as a robot, crawler and bot) is a program that crawls the Internet retrieving Web documents that want to be searchable, then follows links found within the document to retrieve other Web documents.

What is a Splash Page?
A splash page is the first page, usually the home page, of a site used to capture the visitors attention for a short time as a promotion or lead-in to the proper home page.

What is SPM?
SPM (Sales Process Management) is the front-end evaluation and assessment of a company's sales process. Innovative diagnostics benchmark current processes, identify areas of improvement, and codify best sales practices. Through SPM, effective sales processes are put into place that enhance productivity and help generate and increase revenue.

What is a Sponsored Feature Listing?
A sponsored feature listing is a paid text ad displayed at the top of a Web page, before the search results, in search engines.

What is SQL?
SQL (Structured Query Language) is a standard interactive and programming language for getting information from and updating a database.

What is SSI?
SSI (Server-Side Include) is a variable value that a server can include in an HTML file before it sends it to the browser.

What is SSL?
SSL (Secure Socket Layer) is a commonly-used protocol for managing the security of a message transmitted via the Internet.

What is a Stealth Script?
A stealth script is a CGI script that switches page content depending on who or what is accessing the page.

What is Stickiness?
Stickiness is a measure of a user's loyalty to a site, measured in the amount of time spent over a given time period.

What is a Stock Photo?
A stock photo is a copyrighted photographic image that can be licensed for use in a Web site.

What is a Super Affiliate?
A super affiliate is a top performing affiliate, who is capable of generating a significant percentage of an affiliate program's sales.

What is a Superstitial?
A superstitial is a rich media ad format developed by Unicast that combines Flash or other animation technology with Java programming to deliver video-like Web commercials.

What is a Surround Session?
A surround session is a concept whereby ads follow readers as they link from page to page, deploying ads from only one advertiser during the entire visit.

 
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SEO advice: url canonicalization

Before I start collecting feedback on the Bigdaddy data center, I want to talk a little bit about canonicalization, www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc. so that we’re all on the same page.

Q : What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway?
A : Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls:
  • www.example.com
  • example.com/
  • www.example.com/index.html
  • example.com/home.asp
But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set.

Q : So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want?
A : One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links.

Q : Is there anything else I can do?
A : Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.).

Q : If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com?
A : No, definitely don’t do this. If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this. If you did use the url removal tool to remove your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded.

Q : I noticed that you don’t do a 301 redirect on your site from the non-www to the www version, Matt. Why not? Are you stupid in the head?
A : Actually, it’s on purpose. I noticed that several months ago but decided not to change it on my end or ask anyone at Google to fix it. I may add a 301 eventually, but for now it’s a helpful test case.

Q : So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized?
A : Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with upper case to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID).

Q : Let’s talk about the inurl: operator. Why does everyone think that if inurl:mydomain.com shows results that aren’t from mydomain.com, it must be hijacked?
A : Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. Yahoo handles 302 redirects by usually showing the destination url, and we are in the middle of transitioning to a similar set of heuristics. Note that Yahoo reserves the right to have exceptions on redirect handling, and Google does too. Based on our analysis, we will show the source url for a 302 redirect less than half a percent of the time (basically, when we have strong reason to think the source url is correct).

Q : Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google?
A : Nope.

Q : I have some pages in the supplemental results that are old now. What should I do?
A : I wouldn’t spend much effort on them. If the pages have moved, I would make sure that there’s a 301 redirect to the new location of pages. If the pages are truly gone, I’d make sure that you serve a 404 on those pages. After that, I wouldn’t put any more effort in. When Google eventually recrawls those pages, it will pick up the changes, but because it can take longer for us to crawl supplemental results, you might not see that update for a while.

That’s about all I can think of for now. I’ll try to talk about some examples of 302′s and inurl: soon, to help make some of this more concrete.

For More info about  url canonicalization


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Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Give.it Enables Easy Gift Giving Around the Web



When Facebook reminds me that it’s my best friend’s birthday, I try to post the nicest message on her page. Because it’s too late to send a birthday card, I message my birthday wishes, noting that I’ll treat her to lunch and bring my gift then. What I’d rather do—other than have the insight to mail her the perfect card and gift that I bought in an actual store—is virtually take my best friend to her favorite online retail store, let her choose exactly what she wants, and pay for it.

Give.it, which launched last week, is here to help with just that. “Many web stores don't offer the possibility to buy products for someone else. And if they do, it’s quite a hassle. To begin with, you need to know the recipient's home address,” says Erwin van Kralingen, co-founder and CEO of the Amsterdam-based B2B ecommerce company offering the embeddable gift solution for online merchants. “In our research, we also found out that gift recipients often wanted a different size or color, or even a different product altogether. Give.it makes the gifting process easier. Once shoppers click on the button, they select the gift’s recipient from their social media contacts. The recipient then gets notified about the gift through Twitter, Facebook, email or LinkedIn, and can fill out all the necessary details, thereby ensuring that the gift is delivered according to his or her wishes.”

Receiving digital birthday cakes in 2011 from friends through Facebook started it all for van Kralingen. “Looking at that I thought, ‘Wouldn't it be fun to send a real product instead of a digital one?’”

The idea for Give.it followed in October 2012 when van Kralingen was working on his startup Kudoo, a Facebook app that made it possible to give real gifts to your friends. “We had 65 merchants selling products through Kudoo in the Netherlands,” says van Kralingen. “Some of them asked me if we had a solution to implement our easy gift-giving process in their own web store as well. That's how the Give.it button came to life—a transaction model for buying things for your friends online.”

Give.it not only makes it really easy and intuitive to surprise a friend with a gift. For merchants, Give.it facilitates more revenue from gift sales and helps them promote their products on social media in a fun and engaging way.

“We ran a promotion with Starbucks in the Netherlands. They did a product introduction through us, which was all about encouraging customers to give a free breakfast to a friend,” van Kralingen says. “Within a couple of hours, thousands of breakfasts were given through Facebook. They received a lot of attention online. The redemption rate was more than 25 percent. This type of campaign proves that people are more likely to redeem a coupon or promotion when it comes from a friend—and friends are what social media is all about.”

Once you click on the Give.it button, a handy widget appears on your screen. The widget lets you select a gift recipient through Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn (coming to Google+ soon), and add a nice message. You pay safely through PayPal (more options to come), and the receiver gets notified about the gift through email or the social network of your choice. The recipient clicks on a link and fills in address details. If there are more options offered by the merchant, such as different sizes and colors, the recipient can specify these as well. Once the recipient accepts the gift, the giver gets charged and notified, and the merchant gets paid immediately. After this, the merchant receives all the necessary order information and can proceed with shipping.

“What sets Give.it apart from other gifting apps is that we offer a B2B gifting solution for merchants,” van Kralingen says. “Give.it is at the heart of where ecommerce is taking place—merchants’ own web stores. We want to become the gifting standard for the web.”

Give.it has made plugins for several major ecommerce platforms such as Magento, Prestashop, Shopify and Big Cartel, making it really easy for merchants to install and customize the Give.it button. In the next couple of years, van Kralingen expects tens of thousands of merchants to join Give.it, turning the web into a gift store. 



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The New Google Algorithm and What You Need To Know

For the past few weeks I'd seen a pattern repeating itself across the board with most of the clients that I do SEO and content marketing for, small drops in Page Authority and Domain Authority for every domain I was monitoring. I also observed some big leaps up the SERPs for content that was previously ranking poorly.

Despite suspecting that change was afoot, Google remained unusually quiet and while speculation was rife amongst those of us involved in SEO on a daily basis, nothing had been confirmed. That was, until 26th September 2013 when Google came clean and admitted that the new algorithm had been up and running for the past month.

Panda and Penguin were updates which changed part of the algorithm, but Hummingbird has replaced the old algorithm and it’s the biggest change in 3 years. It’s not just a major update or refresh, it’s an entirely new ranking algorithm.

This latest news comes hot on the heels of Google’s announcement that in future, all searches will be secure and as such, keyword data will no longer be available in Google Analytics. Not only this, but many website owners have spent the last few months dealing with the effects of the major Penguin refresh which hit earlier this year and had far reaching effects, making ‘bad’ SEO not just unsuccessful, but ensuring guilty websites were actively penalised.

Hummingbird aims to deliver results which are precise and fast 

Whilst specifics are still somewhat patchy, Google has confirmed that Hummingbird focuses on ranking information based on more intelligent and naturalistic search requests. In short, Google is getting smarter and is now better able to understand the relationships and relevance of words and phrases, instead of just considering a bunch of individual words.

Google Hummingbird At A Glance
  • Many of the existing rules and weightings still apply, so don’t stop doing what you are doing if your activities are based on Penguin pleasing, sustainable and ethical content focused techniques
  • A sizeable 90% of all searches are likely to be affected by Hummingbird though the full extent and reach of its effects is currently unknown
  • Known as Semantic search, more naturalistic or ‘conversational’ search terms (which tend to be long-tail in their nature) are now more important than ever
  • Google still wants to return the most relevant, accurate and useful search results to its users, Hummingbird provides a more sophisticated means for Google to deliver this
  • There is now less emphasis on individual keywords and more emphasis on their collective (semantic) meaning
  • PageRank remains an active ranking signal and Google claims that there is nothing massively different that SEOs need to be doing or worrying about

Summary

If you’ve not noticed any significant changes in the last month, then it looks like you’ve escaped unscathed. Some of the effects we’ve seen have been small however and could easily be missed, including small losses in Domain Authority and drops down SERPs for some previously highly ranking content, while other, less obvious content has risen up.

For some time now, the emphasis has been upon providing useful, high quality content on websites and blogs and upon optimising content towards long tail keywords. This simply means that future SEO activities will be more focused on longer, semantic search terms. In real terms, for those who have already adapted their content marketing and SEO following the Penguin update earlier this year, very little is likely to change.

For more info about The New Google Algorithm and What You Need To Know

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Thursday, September 26, 2013

The New Google “Hummingbird” Algorithm

Google has a new search algorithm, the system it uses to sort through all the information it has when you search and come back with answers. It’s called “Hummingbird” and below, what we know about it so far.

What’s a “search algorithm?”

That’s a technical term for what you can think of as a recipe that Google uses to sort through the billions of web pages and other information it has, in order to return what it believes are the best answers.

What’s “Hummingbird?”

It’s the name of the new search algorithm that Google is using, one that Google says should return better results.

So that “PageRank” algorithm is dead?

No. PageRank is one of over 200 major “ingredients” that go into the Hummingbird recipe. Hummingbird looks at PageRank — how important links to a page are deemed to be — along with other factors like whether Google believes a page is of good quality, the words used on it and many other things (see our Periodic Table Of SEO Success Factors for a better sense of some of these).

Why is it called Hummingbird?

Google told us the name come from being “precise and fast.”

When did Hummingbird start? Today?

Google started using Hummingbird about a month ago, it said. Google only announced the change today.

What does it mean that Hummingbird is now being used?

Think of a car built in the 1950s. It might have a great engine, but it might also be an engine that lacks things like fuel injection or be unable to use unleaded fuel. When Google switched to Hummingbird, it’s as if it dropped the old engine out of a car and put in a new one. It also did this so quickly that no one really noticed the switch.

When’s the last time Google replaced its algorithm this way?

Google struggled to recall when any type of major change like this last happened. In 2010, the “Caffeine Update” was a huge change. But that was also a change mostly meant to help Google better gather information (indexing) rather than sorting through the information. Google search chief Amit Singhal told me that perhaps 2001, when he first joined the company, was the last time the algorithm was so dramatically rewritten.

What about all these Penguin, Panda and other “updates” — haven’t those been changes to the algorithm?

Panda, Penguin and other updates were changes to parts of the old algorithm, but not an entire replacement of the whole. Think of it again like an engine. Those things were as if the engine received a new oil filter or had an improved pump put in. Hummingbird is a brand new engine, though it continues to use some of the same parts of the old, like Penguin and Panda

The new engine is using old parts?

Yes. And no. Some of the parts are perfectly good, so there was no reason to toss them out. Other parts are constantly being replaced. In general, Hummingbird — Google says — is a new engine built on both existing and new parts, organized in a way to especially serve the search demands of today, rather than one created for the needs of ten years ago, with the technologies back then.

What type of “new” search activity does Hummingbird help?

“Conversational search” is one of the biggest examples Google gave. People, when speaking searches, may find it more useful to have a conversation.

“What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example.

Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.

In particular, Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

I thought Google did this conversational search stuff already!

It does (see Google’s Impressive “Conversational Search” Goes Live On Chrome), but it had only been doing it really within its Knowledge Graph answers. Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to Knowledge Graph facts, which may bring back better results.

Does it really work? Any before-and-afters?

We don’t know. There’s no way to do a “before-and-after” ourselves, now. Pretty much, we only have Google’s word that Hummingbird is improving things. However, Google did offer some before-and-after examples of its own, that it says shows Hummingbird improvements.

A search for “acid reflux prescription” used to list a lot of drugs (such as this, Google said), which might not be necessarily be the best way to treat the disease. Now, Google says results have information about treatment in general, including whether you even need drugs, such as this as one of the listings.

A search for “pay your bills through citizens bank and trust bank” used to bring up the home page for Citizens Bank but now should return the specific page about paying bills

A search for “pizza hut calories per slice” used to list an answer like this, Google said, but not one from Pizza Hut. Now, it lists this answer directly from Pizza Hut itself, Google says.

Could it be making Google worse?

Almost certainly not. While we can’t say that Google’s gotten better, we do know that Hummingbird — if it has indeed been used for the past month — hasn’t sparked any wave of consumers complaining that Google’s results suddenly got bad. People complain when things get worse; they generally don’t notice when things improve.

Does this mean SEO is dead?

No, SEO is not yet again dead. In fact, Google’s saying there’s nothing new or different SEOs or publishers need to worry about. Guidance remains the same, it says: have original, high-quality content. Signals that have been important in the past remain important; Hummingbird just allows Google to process them in new and hopefully better ways.

Does this mean I’m going to lose traffic from Google?

If you haven’t in the past month, well, you came through Hummingbird unscathed. After all, it went live about a month ago. If you were going to have problems with it, you would have known by now.

By and large, there’s been no major outcry among publishers that they’ve lost rankings. This seems to support Google saying this is very much a query-by-query effect, one that may improve particular searches — particularly complex ones — rather than something that hits “head” terms that can, in turn, cause major traffic shifts.

But I did lose traffic!

Perhaps it was due to Hummingbird, but Google stressed that it could also be due to some of the other parts of its algorithm, which are always being changed, tweaked or improved. There’s no way to know.

How do you know all this stuff?

Google shared some of it at its press event today, and then I talked with two of Google’s top search execs, Amit Singhal and Ben Gomes, after the event for more details. I also hope to do a more formal look at the changes from those conversations in the near future. But for now, hopefully you’ve found this quick FAQ based on those conversations to be helpful.


Tags : hummingbird algorithm, google algorithm updates, hummingbird, search algorithm, google algorithm, nilesh patel, seo services provider, best information of the world,  nilesh patel forum,  fans of photography,  nilesh patel seo

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Google unveils major upgrade to search algorithm

Google has unveiled an upgrade to the way it interprets users' search requests.
 
The new algorithm, codenamed Hummingbird, is the first major upgrade for three years.  

It has already been in use for about a month, and affects about 90% of Google searches. 
 
At a presentation on Thursday, the search giant was short on specifics but said Hummingbird is especially useful for longer and more complex queries.
 
Google stressed that a new algorithm is important as users expect more natural and conversational interactions with a search engine - for example, using their voice to speak requests into mobile phones, smart watches and other wearable technology.
 
Hummingbird is focused more on ranking information based on a more intelligent understanding of search requests, unlike its predecessor, Caffeine, which was targeted at better indexing of websites.  

It is more capable of understanding concepts and the relationships between them rather than simply words, which leads to more fluid interactions. In that sense, it is an extension of Google's "Knowledge Graph" concept introduced last year aimed at making interactions more human. 
 
In one example, shown at the presentation, a Google executive showed off a voice search through her mobile phone, asking for pictures of the Eiffel Tower. After the pictures appeared, she then asked how tall it was. After Google correctly spoke back the correct answer, she then asked "show me pictures of the construction" - at which point a list of images appeared.  

Big payoffs?
 
However, one search expert cautioned that it was too early to determine Hummingbird's impact. "For me this is more of a coming out party, rather than making me think 'wow', said Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Land.
 
"If you've been watching this space, you'd have already seen how they've integrated it into the [predictive search app] Google Now and conversational search.
 
"To know that they've put this technology further into their index may have some big payoffs but we'll just have to see how it plays out," Mr Sullivan said.
 
The news was announced at an intimate press event at the Silicon Valley garage where founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page worked on the launch of the search engine, which is fifteen years old on Friday.
 
At the event, the search behemoth also announced an updated search app on Apple's iOS, as well as a more visible presence for voice search on its home page.
 

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