Mobile devices are so popular nowadays that the traffic that mobile search brings can no longer be discounted. Because of this plenty of websites now offer mobile versions of their website. If you already have a mobile site though you should make sure that you stay informed about the changes/improvements done by search engines in relation to mobile search to ensure that your mobile site is optimised for mobile search.
One of the improvements in mobile search that you can expect Google to focus on in predictive search. We know this because of a paper published by two Google employees, Maryam Kamvar and Shumeet Baluja, titled Query Suggestions for Mobile Search: Understanding Usage Patterns. The paper revealed that:
users rely heavily on query suggestions, and that;
users will accept a correct suggestion quickly
Because of these findings Kamvar and Baluja concluded that:
Mobile search results should show as many suggestions in a small list as […]
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Written by on June 5th, 2008 with no comments.
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William Slawski wrote a very good entry on the importance of page layout in SEO. To emphasise his point he pointed out to the patent application filed by Kesari and Anandsudhakar in August of 2006 and that was recently published last month. The patent application entitled “Techniques for approximating the visual layout of a web page and determining the portion of the page containing the significant content” is obviously used to help Yahoo! find the parts of a web page that contains the more important content. It seems that at least Yahoo! does determine the importance of the contents of the page based on the page layout, and if Yahoo! does this I guess it is safe to conclude that Google and the other search engines have their own if not similar method of determining the importance of the content based on page layout.
What this means for SEOs is simply […]
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Written by on March 4th, 2008 with no comments.
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Flash sites can look pretty impressive but anyone who knows about search engines would tell you that a flash site is not a good thing - no matter how good it looks. Most search engine spiders are not able to read flash sites so that in most cases the content of flash sites are not indexed at all. According to Google, Googlebot can at least extract text and links from flash sites. However, they cannot determine the structure nor context. Some of the text in flash sites are also stored as images so that they are not indexed even by Googlebot. Obviously, the best thing to do is stay away from flash as much as possible, which means a pure flash site is a stupid thing to do. This is not to say that flash is a bad thing but it if you want to stay away from its negative […]
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Written by on February 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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For those who haven’t noticed or did notice but didn’t use the new features that came out last December here’s a quick overview on the Content Analysis feature. As the name suggests the new feature is very useful at analysing the content of your website. So what exactly does it analyse? The content analysis feature gives a report on metadata issues that could affect Google’s crawling and indexing your web pages as well as your website’s usability. Some of the specific metadata issues looked into by the content analysis feature include:
1. Title tag issues
missing title tags
duplicate title tags
long title tags
short title tags
non-informative title tags
2. Meta description issues
duplicate meta description
long meta description
short meta description
3. Non-indexable content issues
flash files
images
other non-indexable content
Post from: SEO Blog
Webmaster Tools Content Analysis Feature
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Written by on February 9th, 2008 with no comments.
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The long wait is finally over. After 10 years of working hard on HTML 5 the W3C group has at last published the working draft online. According to W3C, “The publication of the First Public Working Draft is a signal to the community to begin reviewing the document.”
You can read the W3C Working Draft in this link and join the working group’s discussion list here.
For version histories please click on the following links:
Twitter messages (non-editorial changes only)
Commit-Watchers mailing list
Interactive Web interface
Subversion interface
HTML diff with the last version in Subversion
When the final version of HTML 5 finally comes out approximately in a couple of years it will be an exciting time for web designers indeed.
Post from: SEO Blog
HTML 5 Working Draft Now Out for Public Review
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Written by on January 23rd, 2008 with no comments.
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For at least the last five years the UK web design industry has been buoyant, but are there signs of an imminent decline, or has it already started?
I have an involvement it two small independent web design agencies, so I think I have a feel for the volume of new enquiries/new business interest that there is out there.
About a month ago two snappily dressed gentlemen arrived at one of our offices requesting a meeting without arranging a prior appointment, this in itself seemed somewhat strange. It transpired that they were from a web design agency in an adjacent town and were seeking to generate business by picking up any overflow work form their competitors. This tactic to increase business seemed rather unorthodox at the time but in isolation I thought no more of it.
Already this year we have had at least two phone calls and one email for competing […]
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Written by on January 15th, 2008 with no comments.
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Creating Ajax applications is all the rage these days but I wouldn’t recommend putting Ajax functionalities into your online applications unnecessarily because sometimes it can hamper the overall functionality of your online application or website. Nonetheless, Ajax can really enhance user experience and in many big and small ways make using your website a […]
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Written by on December 31st, 2007 with no comments.
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We are researching the best way to implement a multi-language website, that would include at least English, French, Italian and Chinese.
Any “Phoenixrealmers” have experience of mult-lingual sites and able to point us in the right direction?
Thanks, Gary.
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Written by on December 5th, 2007 with no comments.
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Do you often find yourself working for free in an effort to obtain more prestigious assignments?
Many web designers work for free to build up their portfolios or and to try and secure new clients. This form of doing work for free is termed as “free pitching”.
Many clients have this habit of inviting design samples from […]
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Written by on November 20th, 2007 with no comments.
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What makes an annoying website? I ask this question because I think very few people intentionally design or developed annoying websites. We end up having an annoying website sometimes when we just think about our preferences instead of thinking about making life easier for our visitors. We forget that the most important aspect of the […]
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Written by on November 15th, 2007 with no comments.
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