Everything For Nothing

How To Improve Your Google Ranking

Twitter Advertising Deal

Are Microsoft and Google hoping to get into Twitter’s treasure trove of real-time information? Yes, says Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, citing sources who indicate that the two companies are separately in talks with Twitter about data licensing deals.This would involve the exchange of several million dollars plus a revenue-share to “compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets of its 54 million monthly users,” Swisher wrote.

What’s unclear is whether either deal will actually come to fruition. More concrete is the likelihood that Twitter won’t strike any exclusive deals, considering the company is (according to Swisher) “seeking to create a large open platform, which many could plug into, from search engines to marketers to publishers to developers.”Twitter, which just raised about $100 million at a valuation somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion, doesn’t have a significant revenue stream in place yet. It’s slated to launch a premium-services package later this year, but big search-data deals with the likes of Microsoft and Google could be a significant additional source of cash. continue reading »

Google Search Suggest for mobile

Google introduced a new option for mobile search: Tip Search Suggest a mobile phone can be synchronized with the hint of a stationary computer. Thus, the user can move search history from the main computer to your mobile phone. Function is available for devices running Android, iPhone and Palm OS.

To use this feature, you must log in to your Google-account before executing the search would then be history query system. After logging in to Google from a mobile phone, the story will be automatically transferred to a portable device after selecting the option “to save your search history. At the moment function is available in test mode users to the U.S.
Referring to Search Engine Journal

Google on Converting Visitors To Customers

Businesses spend a tremendous amount of time, resources, and capital on website development and online marketing initiatives. Getting people to a site is a challenge in itself, but another key aspect is retaining those visitors and converting them into buyers or subscribers.

Google search has set a high bar for relevance, speed, and ease of use. Unfortunately most site searches don’t meet these high expectations: 85 percent don’t return what the user sought, and 80 percent of visitors will abandon a site if search functionality is poor (Jupiter Research).

Search is the starting point to the world’s information. The major search engines have provided a great user experience and consumers have become accustomed to achieving high quality search results.

Why should this be different when a visitor comes to your site? You should be delivering that same experience users are accustomed to with Google and the other engines on your own website.

A good site search or internal search is imperative for a positive user experience. Whether your website is information or commerce-rich, people need to find what they are looking for. Two key points to providing a great user experience:

* Search is one of the most vital features of any content-rich or product-rich web site
* Support is the second most vital aspect – people need to be assisted on their way

Site search tips

Capture data points of searches which get zero search results: use that data to create content which will fill the void. Give people exactly what they are looking for.

How easy is it to find the site-search? Must be simple – don’t hide the search box. Instead of having a button that says search, where you have to click through to another page to actually conduct a search, have a search box above the fold in plain sight.

Are all your pages getting indexed in search? Make sure this is happening not just in Google, but in internal site searches.

Are synonyms triggering related pages? IE – if you have a site selling computers, is your search engine looking at pages about laptops too if someone does a query for the term netbook?

Date biasing – influencing search rankings by the age of content. Administrators should specify the influence of age in site search from low, medium, high to maximum, depending on strategy.

Top results biasing – ability to control biasing of Top N search results. This is important to highlight items you are interested in putting in the spotlight.

Give higher importance to specific section of web site – for example first 3 results can be from product or catalog pages, to help increase conversions.

Good content and products are vital – without that, it doesn’t matter if people are searching.

Study the use of your site search. Site search metrics can provide deep insights into what your customers want.

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ImHalal, a search engine made for Muslims

Let’s say you are a Muslim and you are totally not satisfied with the search filters provided by Google and other search engines. Here comes a search engine named ImHalal that will give you the ease to search the Internet without coming across any content that might be considered as ‘Haram’ according to the Islamic Law.

For a test, we entered some queries such as Alcohol, Nudity etc and were impressed to see that ImHalal does exactly what it’s supposed to, it blocks the query and warns the user since the results for the query may contain Haram content.

Thats not all! ImHalal even gives you a rating for the searched query if its explicit or contains any sort of Haram content. Moreover, it is able to fetch not only links, but also images and news for any particular query. The search engine uses various techniques to determine which results fetched are supposed to be ‘Halal’ or ‘Haram’.

Now it may not be the best search engine out there but it still comes with a noble purpose. Especially, it can be of great use in Muslim households where the parents are concerned about the types of sites their children visit on the Internet.

Ready to try it our for yourself? Go Halal.