Online Reputation Management: Monitor Your Online Reputation

At the time to use a service or buy a product, consumers and businesses use the Internet as a source of information and comparison. A recent study published by a renowned organization informs that 60% of users are in search engines to find information on a product and / or service. This means that the content of the Internet has a significant influence over the decision of consumers to make a purchase. That is solely depends upon your e-reputation i.e. How someone, something is seen on the Internet.

That is why the quality of content pages published on the Internet is increasingly important. It is crucial that potential customers are not getting pernicious information, which runs counter to your products and services. There are various online strategies to resolve this type of publicity damages, but the main thing is to know what is said about your business on the net.

If you are a victim of a pernicious and negative publicity in the search results in any form whatsoever. Search Engine Reputation Management (or SERM) tactics can help you to shelter your reputation from the negative search results that are visible on some important search engine queries. To do that you need to analyze each particular case and puts in place a strategy personally to resolve any problem of negative reputation. This will include a review of search results, forums and blogs for inherent opinions on company products or under your name.

How can you monitor your online reputation?

Search engines are probably the most important source to monitor your reputation. Use these search services for a search by name, company or product.
• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN

Blogs are becoming more and more influence on the services listed below, you can browse the blogosphere.
• Technorati
• Google Blog Search

News services quickly to show whether it is news about your company or its products.
Tip: Use the possibilities of a news alerts via e-mail that fit your supervised terms, to inform.
• Google News
• Yahoo News
• MSN News

Audio Indexing: Google listening

No no. There is no spelling mistake in the title of this ticket. Google is not "to" listen to (whatever ... but that's another matter), but Google now has the ability to listen in terms of indexing. More specifically, it "simply" indexes, in videos or audio files, the content of these videos or files, "verbatim”. This service called Google Audio Indexing (Gaudi) this therefore allows the user to search "word for word" directly in those files. The experimental at the moment (it is still attached to the Google Labs) runs only on political speeches and videos of the contenders for the White House. This news is important because indexing audio is a crucial issue for those involved in information retrieval.

Google Updates Google Suggest

Google Suggest is a feature designed to make searching both faster and easier. Whether you are typing into the search box on Google Toolbar or Google.com, or the Omnibox in Google Chrome, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. So for example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "prog," Google Suggest might offer you refinements such as "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." Again, these suggestions allow you to enter your searches faster, but also in a way that will more likely get you the results you're looking for.

That's what occurs on the surface of Google Suggest. Here's what happens under the hood. To provide its recommendations Google Suggest needs to know what you've already typed, so these partial queries are sent to Google. For 98% of these requests, we don't log any data at all and simply return the suggestions. For the remaining 2% of cases (which we select randomly), we do log data, like IP addresses, in order to monitor and improve the service.

However, given the concerns that have been raised about Google storing this information -- and its limited potential use -- we decided that we will anonymize it within about 24 hours (basically, as soon as we practically can) in the 2% of Google Suggest requests we use. This will take a little time to implement, but we expect it to be in place before the end of the month.

All data retention is a balance between user privacy and trust on the one hand, and security and innovation on the other. In the case of Google Suggest we decided it's possible to provide a great service while anonymizing data almost immediately. But in other cases - such as our core web search - storing data like IP addresses for a time is crucial to make improvements to search quality, improve security, fight fraud and reduce spam.

Source: Official Google Blog: Update to Google Suggest

Download Google Chrome now

Google's new web browser Google Chrome is now now live and available for download.

Visit http://www.google.com/chrome to download and start exploring.

Chrome: Google launched its open source browser

After the failed takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft, there is a new arm wrestling on the Internet with the response from Google. The giant search engines on Tuesday launched its Internet browser, Google Chrome facing Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Google has unveiled its official blog Monday evening: "We will launch the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in over 100 countries." This will be free software: you can download the applications without paying. Its source code is open; the software will be free, reusable and modifiable by any user.

Digg Soon In Bag Of Google?

According to TechCrunch, Google and Digg reportedly signed a letter of intent, and would be (finally) on the verge of agreeing on a price of around 200M $ (200 million dollars, roughly 130 million Euros) .

This is actually several months as rumors of takeover revolve around Digg. Community website in 2004, Digg is experiencing great popularity that attracts necessarily coveted. But the sale is a possibility that does not like Digg users who have already threatened to desert the ranks if such event were to materialize. The creator of Digg, Jay Adelson, had had to calm the wind of revolt, saying that rumors of takeover by Microsoft or Google were unfounded. Yet, these same rumors back in charge.

SEO Recommendations By Google For Website Owners!!

I was reading an article on Google regarding What is an SEO? Does Google recommend them? And I found something very interesting there. Initially that article was mainly focused on providing negative information about SEO like SEO scam information and the disadvantages of SEO. But now they have re-written that article and supported the SEO techniques and valuable services.

Google have recommended some valuable services of SEO for website owners in its article. That includes:

• Reviewing and providing recommendations on your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Managing online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training

Google have also suggested the website owners regarding when they should hire a SEO for the website. In its article, Google recommend that an SEO should be hired at the starting level of website design or before the website launching. So that a website owner and SEO can make a website Google friendly and remove all the technical errors/reasons from the website that could affect negatively to the website in the future.

Important questions to assess the quality of your site

Here is a checklist of some important questions to evaluate the quality of your website:

Accessibility

1. Are the content structurally separate elements of navigation?
2. Is the site compatible with all browsers?
3. Is it compatible with the coding standards W3C? Is it valid HTML / CSS?
4. Alt tags are in place on all important images?
5. Alternative text being put in place to transmit vital information in images and multimedia files?

Navigation

1. The text visible on the links provides a clear indication of where they lead?
2. Depth - what is the maximum number of clicks it takes to reach a page in the depths of the site?
3. Responsiveness to click - is this a response is given immediately (0.1 seconds) after a click is made on a hyper link?
4. Is it intuitive to navigate? Are there any links or buttons understood as text, which are not click able?
5. Readability (already discussed somewhat): the type and size of fonts used.
6. THE GOAL of the site is clearly identifiable? The objective should become clear within a few seconds without need to read a lot.
7. A call to action on each page, not dead.

Design

1. Is the design of the site is aesthetically attractive?
2. The colors used are they harmonious and logically linked?
3. Is the choice of colors are visually accessible? (For example have a fairly high contrast to help color blind and partially sighted people to read the site appropriately)
4. Is the design is adapted to your audience The standard size of the text should be legible, for visitors who do not know how to adjust their browser.
5. The policies must be easily legible and degraded with elegance. This should give good results with various screen resolutions.

Content

1. Whether your website subject is brief and informative as well?
2. Is the writing style of the site is suitable for the purpose and "speaks" the target audience?
3. The body of texts is limited to less than 80 characters per line?
4. The contrast between the text and background color is it enough to make reading easy?
5. In the articles, there should be links to more detailed explanations on specific issues or definitions of terms jargon. Do you do that?
6. Have you about page identifying the author of content or credits to the source for articles that were not written by the site owner himself?

Security

1. No obvious security hole?
2. Your forms are resistant to the special characters?
3. Your private directories are protected by passwords via the file. Htaccess?
4. Whether the public directories (cgi-bin, images, etc.) are indexed or do you have in place permission settings to block access?
5. The customer data are stored online, if so, this database is adequately defended it against external access?

Other technical considerations

1. Does the site load quickly - even for users with a modem?
2. Are all the links (internal and external) are valid and active?
3. The scripts are free of errors?
4. Is the site free of errors on the server side?

Other considerations Marketing

1. The site is properly optimized for search engines (essential text stressed, title tags relevant, as the text presented to H1, reliable and outgoing links contextually linked, etc.)?
2. Is the home page encourages visitors to go further in the site or to the basket?
3. Does the site contains elements designed to encourage future visits (i.e. with a contest, a newsletter, the "tell a friend", a forum with an option ' registration, a toolbar download, RSS,
4. The file Robots.txt is it configured?
5. The Sitemap: is it available?

Newbie Bonus: Almost Everyone is Entitled

When Google index a new website, the particular website receives a bonus for a period of two to three months that is known as “newbie bonus” in the SEO jargon. This literally means "Bonus for new".

Google places the new site on the first pages of results for related keywords, sometimes even in the top 10. Thus, the webmaster has got the opportunity to prove itself and demonstrate that its site is interesting and can sustain the current positions in Google rankings. Depending on the number of visits during the first month and the evolution of content, Google decides if the site should be removed from the top 10 or not.

So to get good positions over Google, It is important to ensure that regular changes in the content should be made so that search engines can observe that it's a living site and not a ruin and you could be benefited by newbie bonus provided by Google.

Google Included Hindi In Its Translate Service

Google has launched the Google Translate in Hindi. This feature will give an ease to users to convert from English to Hindi.

Users can avail this service at http://www.google.com/translate_t and view any page from English to Hindi. In addition you can also type using your normal keyboard. For example if you type “aap”, it will automatically convert into Hindi. You do not need to use any special keyboard to type Hindi sentences.

Also you can add an iGoogle Gadget and get access to Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam and create their own scraps or blogs in these languages.

Presently Google Translate Service allows for translation of English into 14 languages including Arabic and Hindi. The company announced on its web site that it is working to include more languages.

"We're working to support other languages and will introduce them as soon as the automatic translation meets our standards. It's difficult to project how long this will take, as the problem is complex and each language presents its own unique challenges," Google added.

Digital Marketing - A New Era Of Marketing

The term digital marketing has emerged recently in the world of professional marketing. Whilst digital marketing include so many technique and practice enclosed within the Internet Marketing, it extends beyond this by including other channels with which to reach people that do not require the use of The Internet.

Indeed, there was no terminology to describe the actions of companies made to reach their prospects / customers across all digital media (computer, mobile phone, podcast player, video games and display dynamic - billboard outside & TV point of sale). The digital marketing is a discipline designed to promote products and services using a medium or a digital communication channel to reach consumers in a personal way, ultra-targeted and interactive for a reasonable cost.

In view of the rise of new media companies are entrain to change their marketing organization. Thus, the Internet marketing experts see their scope of responsibilities grow to encompass the issues of digital marketing. They must learn to target consumers not only on the Internet, but on all digital media. Those responsible for advertising will also have to learn to control this area. As an example of the evolution of media consumption, an American teenager spends more time playing video games than watching television. To reach these consumers in grass, companies will therefore have to seek ways to be present in an intelligent manner in video games.

Spammy Robots List

Here is a list of some unwanted robots, that crawl your web pages for email address to spam you with advertisements. They can also be referred to as Spiders, Web Wanderers, and Web Crawlers. You can block these by using this code:

Code:

User-agent: aipbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

User-agent: Alexibot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Aqua_Products
Disallow: /

User-agent: asterias
Disallow: /

User-agent: b2w/0.1
Disallow: /

User-agent: BackDoorBot/1.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: becomebot
Disallow: /

User-agent: BlowFish/1.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: Bookmark search tool
Disallow: /

User-agent: BotALot
Disallow: /

User-agent: BotRightHere
Disallow: /

User-agent: BuiltBotTough
Disallow: /

User-agent: Bullseye/1.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: BunnySlippers
Disallow: /

User-agent: CheeseBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: CherryPicker
Disallow: /

User-agent: CherryPickerElite/1.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: CherryPickerSE/1.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: Copernic
Disallow: /

User-agent: cosmos
Disallow: /

User-agent: Crescent
Disallow: /

User-agent: Crescent Internet ToolPak HTTP OLE Control v.1.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: DittoSpyder
Disallow: /

User-agent: EmailCollector
Disallow: /

User-agent: EmailSiphon
Disallow: /

User-agent: EmailWolf
Disallow: /

User-agent: EroCrawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: ExtractorPro
Disallow: /

User-agent: FairAd Client
Disallow: /

User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /

User-agent: Flaming AttackBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Foobot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Gaisbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: GetRight/4.2
Disallow: /

User-agent: Harvest/1.5
Disallow: /

User-agent: hloader
Disallow: /

User-agent: httplib
Disallow: /

User-agent: HTTrack 3.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: humanlinks
Disallow: /

User-agent: IconSurf
Disallow: /
Disallow: /favicon.ico

User-agent: InfoNaviRobot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Iron33/1.0.2
Disallow: /

User-agent: JennyBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Kenjin Spider
Disallow: /

User-agent: Keyword Density/0.9
Disallow: /

User-agent: larbin
Disallow: /

User-agent: LexiBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: libWeb/clsHTTP
Disallow: /

User-agent: LinkextractorPro
Disallow: /

User-agent: LinkScan/8.1a Unix
Disallow: /

User-agent: LinkWalker
Disallow: /

User-agent: LNSpiderguy
Disallow: /

User-agent: lwp-trivial
Disallow: /

User-agent: lwp-trivial/1.34
Disallow: /

User-agent: Mata Hari
Disallow: /

User-agent: MIIxpc
Disallow: /

User-agent: MIIxpc/4.2
Disallow: /

User-agent: Mister PiX
Disallow: /

User-agent: moget
Disallow: /

User-agent: moget/2.1
Disallow: /

User-agent: MSIECrawler
Disallow: /

User-agent: NetAnts
Disallow: /

User-agent: NICErsPRO
Disallow: /

User-agent: Offline Explorer
Disallow: /

User-agent: Openbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Openfind
Disallow: /

User-agent: Openfind data gatherer
Disallow: /

User-agent: Oracle Ultra Search
Disallow: /

User-agent: PerMan
Disallow: /

User-agent: ProPowerBot/2.14
Disallow: /

User-agent: ProWebWalker
Disallow: /

User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Python-urllib
Disallow: /

User-agent: QueryN Metasearch
Disallow: /

User-agent: Radiation Retriever 1.1
Disallow: /

User-agent: RepoMonkey
Disallow: /

User-agent: RepoMonkey Bait & Tackle/v1.01
Disallow: /

User-agent: RMA
Disallow: /

User-agent: searchpreview
Disallow: /

User-agent: SiteSnagger
Disallow: /

User-agent: SpankBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: spanner
Disallow: /

User-agent: SurveyBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: suzuran
Disallow: /

User-agent: Szukacz/1.4
Disallow: /

User-agent: Teleport
Disallow: /

User-agent: TeleportPro
Disallow: /

User-agent: Telesoft
Disallow: /

User-agent: The Intraformant
Disallow: /

User-agent: TheNomad
Disallow: /

User-agent: TightTwatBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: toCrawl/UrlDispatcher
Disallow: /

User-agent: True_Robot
Disallow: /

User-agent: True_Robot/1.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: turingos
Disallow: /

User-agent: TurnitinBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: TurnitinBot/1.5
Disallow: /

User-agent: URL Control
Disallow: /

User-agent: URL_Spider_Pro
Disallow: /

User-agent: URLy Warning
Disallow: /

User-agent: VCI
Disallow: /

User-agent: VCI WebViewer VCI WebViewer Win32
Disallow: /

User-agent: Web Image Collector
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebAuto
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebBandit
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebBandit/3.50
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebCapture 2.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebCopier
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebCopier v.2.2
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebCopier v3.2a
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebEnhancer
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebSauger
Disallow: /

User-agent: Website Quester
Disallow: /

User-agent: Webster Pro
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebStripper
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebZip
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebZip
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebZip/4.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebZIP/4.21
Disallow: /

User-agent: WebZIP/5.0
Disallow: /

User-agent: Wget
Disallow: /

User-agent: wget
Disallow: /

User-agent: Wget/1.5.3
Disallow: /

User-agent: Wget/1.6
Disallow: /

User-agent: WWW-Collector-E
Disallow: /

User-agent: Xenu's
Disallow: /

User-agent: Xenu's Link Sleuth 1.1c
Disallow: /

User-agent: Zeus
Disallow: /

User-agent: Zeus 32297 Webster Pro V2.9 Win32
Disallow: /

User-agent: Zeus Link Scout
Disallow: /

Robots.txt - Stop Search Engines To Access Your Private Files

The robots.txt file is a text file containing commands to the engine crawlers research to clarify their pages who may or may not be indexed. Thus any search engine began its exploration of a website seeking robots.txt at the root of the site.

Format robots.txt

The robots.txt (written in lower case and plural) is an ASCII file that are at the root of the site and may contain the following commands:

* User-Agent: allows you to specify the robot affected by the following guidelines.
* The value means "all search engines".
* Disallow: allows you to specify the pages to exclude from indexing. Each page or path to exclude must be on a line at hand and must begin with. The value / sole means "all pages."

The robots.txt file should contain no blank line!

Examples of robots.txt:

* Exclusion of all pages:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

* Exclusion of any page (equivalent to the absence of robots.txt, all pages are visited):

User-Agent: *
Disallow:

* Authorization of a single robot:

User-Agent: nomDuRobot
Disallow:
User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

* Exclusion of a robot:

User-Agent: NomDuRobot
Disallow: /
User-Agent: *
Disallow:

* Excluding one-page:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: / directory / path / page.html

* Exclusion of several page:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: / directory / path / page.html
Disallow: / repertoire/chemin/page2.html
Disallow: / repertoire/chemin/page3.html

* Exclusion of all pages of a directory and its subfolders:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: / directory /

Marketing Public Relations in 3 Easy Steps

Step 1

Develop a news-worthy, informative release that both introduces your company and informs a targeted audience about anything from new key hires, new service offerings, how a political climate affects your small business, or promoting your attendance of an event.

The key in step one is to write the release so that it both informs without sounding promotional and uses key words, a couple of links, and an About Us.

Step 2

Prepare the release, select related topics, identify relevant keywords and target its distribution based on geography and interest.

A targeted release will result in more valuable traffic. What you don’t want to do is submit releases that drive a tremendous amount of traffic that never convert to something more.

Step 3

Choose a delayed send of the release. The release should be timely, but sending the release out on a Friday night will result in it being seen as “old news” by the public come Monday morning.

Conclusion ::

Your online press release is as easy to distribute as cut and paste. It’s more powerful than self-serving online banner ads and it’s much less expensive than you might think.

Give online press releases a try. You’ll see that it’s really pretty easy.

Page Rank(PR) Algorithm

PageRank is a registered trademark and patented by Google on January 9, 1999 which protects a family of algorithms used to assign a numerical relevance of the documents (or web pages) indexed by a search engine. Its properties are discussed by experts in search engine optimization. The PageRank system is used by the popular Google search engine to help you determine the importance or relevance of a page. It was developed by the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

The initial PageRank algorithm where their creators presented the prototype of Google: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine":

PR (A) = (1 - d) + d (PR (T1) / C (T1) + ... + PR (Tn) / C (Tn)



Where PR (A) is the PageRank of a page; PR (Ti) is the PageRank of pages that link to you A, C (Ti) is the number of outbound links on the page you; d is a variable factor which can be between 0 and 1.

PageRank relies on the democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of the value of a specific page. Google interprets a link in a page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks beyond the volume of votes, or links a page receives and also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages considered "important" worth more, and help to make other pages "important". The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank of all pages that link.

Benefits of Online Marketing Public Relations

Aside from possible media exposure, online press releases are an extraordinarily easy way to increase your website’s reach and rank within search engines.

The reach of your website is dramatically increased as your promotional press release makes its way all over the web through news distribution sites. This larger reach opens up numerous channels for traffic to get to your site.

In addition to increasing the reach of your site, online press releases also increase your site’s rank. Search Engines rely on more than keyword frequency within a site to determine if the site should be displayed or not. They also rely on the number of sites linking to your site. The thinking is that the more sites that link to yours, the more likely your site stands as credible and expert.

Whenever you submit any press release.Within minutes the release is featured all over the web from new-related sites to industry blogs. Overnight your site will be seen by search engines as being linked to by not one or two sites, but hundreds. This increase in the number of sites linking to your own will both increase the number of channels for traffic to make it to your site, but also increase your site’s rank, achieving a higher position in related search engine queries.

Optimization For The Yahoo Search Engine

Most companies today take advantage of the internet as a major marketing and information dissemination tool. To maximize the use of the internet, companies rely on search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that their websites and web pages muster enough traffic. Although search engine optimization aims to have websites at the top of almost all search engine result pages (SERPs), it’s quite common to see search engine optimization focusing on major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

--- Giant Search Engines Targeting ---
It is hard to do search engine optimization resulting to a good ranking in almost all search engines since every search engine relies on different basis and categories on ranking sites. In other words, different search engines make use of different algorithms to determine every site’s importance. Criteria that search engines set for result ranking vary from search engine to search engine. As a result most SEO service providers opt to maximize sites for search engines that can provide the most ideal volume of traffic.

--- Google-centric SEO is Short-Sighted SEO ---
Most SEO’s would basically focus their efforts to maximize websites relative to Google because it is the most commonly used search engine. But if you take a closer look into the matter, you will conclude that disregarding the searches done through Yahoo could mean a considerable amount of lost traffic. Although Yahoo does not process as much searches as Google, it still consists a good fraction of the searches done on the internet.

--- Balancing Google and Yahoo SEO ---
Both Yahoo and Google depend on keyword density to rank a website. The only difference is that to optimize your site with the Yahoo search engine, a higher keyword frequency is required. Keyword density is more important a factor for Yahoo than it is for Google; although you don’t need to use the same word or group of words to attain the ideal keyword density. Yahoo will consider synonyms and other word variants that are of the same or related meaning to the given keyword to make up the keyword density calculation. Even the plural from of the keyword is still counted when considering keyword density.
Taking the keyword factor into consideration, though, Google and Yahoo possess a very different approach in keyword density. Since Yahoo is very much keyword-based, you may fear that stuffing your site with too many keywords would endanger your site ranking with Google. However, this is not really the case.
It is true that Google may turn its back on your site because of overwhelming keyword count. But as stated above, your site does not need to contain the same keyword form to attain the keyword density for Yahoo. Taking advantage of the fact that Yahoo counts synonyms, plural forms and variants in assessing keyword density, your site could justify both Yahoo’s and Google’s keyword requirement.

--- Yahoo SEO Special ---
Content is very important to attain a good ranking with the Yahoo search engine. This refers to both quantity and quality of your site’s contents. Be mindful of relevance of your site’s contents to a given keyword and at the same time make sure that your site is full of it. Adding relevant contents from time to time would also be a good strategy to take the top spots with the Yahoo search engine results pages.
Aside from content, format should not be taken for granted if you want to have Yahoo on your side. Unlike Google’s web spiders, Yahoo’s bot doesn’t dig deeper into your sites pages to index them. It is therefore very necessary for you to create a very good site map to guide this very lazy animal!

And lastly, even though Yahoo is very much into your site’s content when it comes to ranking in the SERPs, don't forget that inbound links are still very important. Aside from making sure that your site does well with Google when it comes to links, Yahoo will also need the help it gets from inbound links to index your pages.