Monday, March 11, 2013

Track Keyword Trends Using Fresh Web Explorer


SEOMoz announced Fresh Web Explorer tool for SEOmoz PRO account users. Maintaining track of latest blogs, forums and websites is most challenging task for online marketers. Many of the tools are not effective to track important links and mentions.

Topsy tool provides information about social mentions and tools like Buzzstream, Trackur, Ubervu that contains set of unique features whereas fresh web explorer tool provides complete information easily.

Fresh web explorer (FWE) works like an open site explorer but there are few differences. FWE provides you updated information like full text of article content, blogs, forum threads, comments, and more. A new metric termed as feed authority specifically designed for FWE to sort out the data easily.





Social mention is a social media research which is a great way to know what people are saying about your company and product across the web. For online marketers mention data has become a crucial part. FWE makes you to keep a track of data over time, and it provides information like for what type of content you will get mentions, shares and links.

To monitor all social media, web citations you may face problems. So, to come out of it SEOmoz introduced a new tool called fresh web explorer(FWE). Every tool has its own significance but Fresh Web Explorer delivers them all in one place.

By typing a phrase, url, or brand name in the search box of FWE tool, you will get graph identifying your mentions and you can sort out or filter results based on previous week, month according to your requirement. By using this tool you can even compare multiple brands or terms. This is an effective and great tool to deliver uncertain results which were difficult to track.

The foremost thing you will notice is the page title and URL that the mention is listed on. You can click the URL to visit the page and find your mention. If you find a page that does not have your mention or looks like spam, you can find issue easily by clicking flag button which is at right menu.

  Hence, Fresh Web Explorer is a great tool and appears to be very accurate when compared to other tools like Trackur, Ubervu, Buzzstream, and SocialMention.












Trust Rank of a Website


Trust rank is one of the important factor that Google uses in determining the website rankings. Google Trust rank is an algorithm used to determine how trustworthy a given website is. Trust rank is a numerical value given by the search engines based on the backlinks and the content on your site. A high trust rank has impact in the rankings. You can rank high if Google trusts you.

Trust rank also determines whether Google can trust the page rank of your website or not. If Google doesn't trust your website, it assumes the page rank of your website is obtained by manipulation. Trust rank determines the websites which are spam and which can be trusted. The sites which are good will have high trust scores and poor trust scores can be seen in spam sites.

Trust rank consists of the following parameters:

1.The Age of the Domain: 
Use old domains instead of new ones. Search engines rely on this factor because the age or history of the domain cannot be changed in SEO. The trust rank will be decreased if you use new domains.

2.Quality of Content: 
Produce high quality content rather than duplicate content. The content should be unique and user friendly. Quality backlinks are based on unique content.

3.Quality of Backlinks: 
The quality of backlinks is important than quantity of backlinks you generate to your website. The bulk of paid links may increase your page rank but it will lower your trust rank and also affects the rankings. Your site may be penalized due to the backlinks from obscure websites.

4.Fresh Content: 
You can attract users more by adding fresh pages. Update your site with fresh content as frequently as possible.

5.Website Traffic: If you have more visitors then the traffic of your site increases and gets higher trust rank.

How to Check Trust Rank?
You can check your website's trust rank by using few tools. Trust rank checker is used to show the trust rank of a website using 1000 point system. You can rank in top positions if you have high trust rank. If your trust rank is more than 3 then your site has good trust in search engines. If the trust rank of your site is from 4 then it is very good and if it is more than 5 then your site has excellent trust.

How Quality Backlinks with High Trust Rank can Raise your Site's Rankings?
 Quality backlinks is one of the factors which could influence the trust rank of your website. Your website can get quality backlinks if you implement a proper link building strategy. The backlink which comes to your site is said to be good if it has high traffic, quality content, low alexa rank and high domain authority.




The sites which rank top for your targeted keywords have trust with Google and they can help your website also to get trust. If your site has higher trust rank then the authority of your website also increases. Hence if your site has quality backlinks with high trust rank then it ranks well in the search results.

Conclusion:
A website with low trust rank can have high page rank and a website with low page rank could have high trust rank. Trust rank determines your actual rankings and trust levels granted to your site on the internet. Hence trust rank factor is important in ranking high in the search results.

Page layout algorithm improvement


In October 2012 Google has announced officially that it has updated the "Page Layout Algorithm" which was launched in January 2012.

When a user performs a search operation he wants to see the content right away in search results. The users are not happy if they didn't get the content immediately. So many complaints are coming in these days about this problem. The "Page Layout Algorithm" is an algorithm that helps us to find more quality sites in search results. It looks at the layout of a web page and the content when we click on the result.

Google doesn't want users to scroll down the page for the content; they want the content as quickly as possible. If our competitor site and our site have the same content and our competitor site has that content close to the top of the page and the users have to scroll down to find the content in our site, then there may be a chance that Google will give the importance to our competitor. So it affects the sites that don't have the content above the fold.

It's very common to place the ads above the fold for many websites, those ads also perform well. There is no affect of this algorithm change for the sites that place the ads to a normal degree, but it affects the sites that place ads to an extensive degree. It gets hard to find the actual content of the page if placing the ads goes much further. So this algorithm has the impact on the sites which have more ads above the fold or which have small amount of content above the fold. See the below figure.





According to Matt Cutts the initial January update of this algorithm had affected less than 1% of search queries globally and it affects English queries only. Matt Cutt said “If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly.”

If we want to know whether our website has been affected by the page layout algorithm then check how our website is displaying the content above the fold. For this we can use Browser Size Tool to see how our web page would look under different screen resolutions. Google has added this tool to analytics.


To check this tool in analytics, go to the content section - in-page analytics - browser size. This will display the page below the fold. If we want to know the percentage of visitors who can see the page, then click on anywhere on the screen or by controlling frequency using slider.

So it’s better to focus on delivering the best user experience on our websites rather than specific algorithm tweaks.




Link Wheel


Link wheel is a set of connected websites which are linked to a targeted website thus forming a wheel like structure. It is one of the useful tactics of seo which builds quality back links in turn helps to get huge traffic to your site. The wheel consists of unique web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, blogger, wordpress, etc.
The below figure represents link wheel formed by few of web 2.0 sites with Page rank 3 to 9.
 




In the above link wheel figure, Squidoo, blogger, wordpress, weebly, facebook, vox are some of the web2.0 sites. All these unique web2.0 sites are linked to one another and finally to main site i.e., your site in this figure.

Link wheel is a method of creating a new blog with few of web 2.0 sites on specific topics with targeted keywords. On these sites, one can create articles of their own and upload them. The content of the article should be unique with limited words up to 200. The content should link to one of the web 2.0 sites and also include one link to your site. Like-wise upload few articles to web 2.0 sites and make sure that one link should be connected to adjacent website with targeted keywords and one link to main web site. i.e. your site. Thus forming a structure called "Link Wheel".

The content should be user readable so that your site can attract huge traffic. The effectiveness of a link wheel depends on the number of quality backlinks from the sites.
Link wheel improves page rank of your site in search engines with quality back links from unique web sites. Link wheel creates good visibility with the unique and fresh posts on web 2.0 sites. Thus the publicity of your site increases by huge traffic and page rank gets improved in search engines.


When Does Google Display Alternative Titles and Descriptions?


When we type a search query there are chances that most of the times we see alternative titles and descriptions. Those titles and descriptions are expected by search algorithms based on search queries.  Depending upon the analysis of location of the query terms alternative snippets are generated by document retrieval systems.

The Way How Google Does Identify Rich Snippets


Following are some of the factors based on which Google classifies a best snippet:

1st Factor:

1.In reference to a search query paragraphs are recognized and a snippet is generated by calculating distances of recognized paragraphs.
2.A paragraph is identified by analyzing score and relying on length, distances of paragraphs.
3.As soon as a paragraph is chosen immediately snippet is generated which comprises of a large number of predetermined characters of preferred paragraph.

2nd Factor:

While 2nd factor is that depending on search query a paragraph is chosen and snippet is generated by counting location of query terms with in document.




How does Google decide upon snippets for search results when it chooses snippets from the content of pages?


Google displays meta description as a snippet at times only if it is well written with keywords included in it that are required for that page and has around 150 characters. Even there are chances that google sometimes displays a sentence that is well written from the content of a page.

Even though there are no words or phrases in meta description for the page which is optimized but if that page ranks well in search results then its meta description appears as a snippet. There are cases such as a page may not even have meta descriptions, or a page might have meta-description that is identical to every other meta description, or even a page might have very short meta description and is not at all descriptive.

Here are some clues that from where does Google displays content and when does it chooses to display content from a page:
1.If in case search terms appear on pages which have lengthy introductions or abstract then Google make a decision to draw content from start of a page to display it in search results.
2.If in case search phrases of ranking pages appear in conclusion of a page then Google displays content from conclusion of page as snippet.

Numerous Snippet Generation Algorithms:


Google depending on perception of search query may decide to use which algorithm to generate a snippet for that particular page. There are chances that Google looks at length of paragraphs that comprise query terms and distance of paragraphs either from start of page or end of page. Some documents such as scholarly literature may have a high metadata where as a blog or ecommerce page might have less meta data.

Location based rules and language based rules are the two ways by which Google decides a snippet.

Location based rules:

Location based rules are those where a snippet is chosen by relying on location of search queries in a page or a paragraph is selected either from beginning or end of a page. Each paragraph is ranked based on length and distance of paragraph either from one location that is start or end where search queries are present.

Beginnings of pages are chosen for snippets if page comprises of abstracts, executive summaries or comprehensive introductions. While to select a snippet from end of page it should either contain a conclusion or else summarization of that document.

Language dependent rules:

To select a snippet these are some of language dependent rules:

1.Percentage of punctuation characters in a paragraph.
2.A punctuation or preposition is used to end a paragraph.
3.Are words in paragraph lengthy?
4.How many bold or italicized words present in a paragraph.

 Even though a paragraph contains all search phrases there are chances that it may not be selected as snippet due to following reasons:

1.If a paragraph is very short.
2.In case if a paragraph is overly punctuated.
3.If a paragraph fails to maintain language specific rules.
4.If it has bold or italicized words above threshold.
5.Even if search query is too far from both ends of page.

A snippet is chosen if it scores above threshold for that particular page. And also if it maintain below rules:

1.Selected paragraph should contain predetermined number of words.
2.It should contain first 2 to 3 sentences of paragraph.
3.Either middle portion of page contains one of the search queries.
4.It can be either entire paragraph.

A snippet is important for a page as it determines users to click it from search results.