MarketingSherpa, which recently published this finding in its 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – based on surveying 2,194 search marketers – suggests this may be due to social media taking less time than SEO to impact on conversions.

37 percent of Internet Marketers in the survey rated social media as very effective in boosting brand or product awareness and 37 percent rated it as very effective in brand or product reputation. As such, it’s possible that social media ‘lays the foundation’ for search engine users to be more inclined to recognize, trust, click-through and respond to offers on the website associated with a given brand or product.

If you’ve ever been curious about the process, or have ever wanted to know some of the specific mechanisms that allow you to surf the Internet. There are millions of Webservers deployed across the globe to serve your queries. Sometime back we were researching on the total amount of power consumed by servers installed across the globe.

Here are some insights about actually how many webservers are deployed across the globe, their market share and in future I will be trying to explore more into the energy efficiency and power figures of these machines.

In the January 2010, a survey carried by the web-server-tracking UK research outfit Netcraft, which digged upto  206,741,990 websites worldwide reveals that Google – now runs nearly 13 per cent of all active web sites .

According to the latest survey data from Netcraft  the Google Web Server (GWS) is running nearly 11 million active sites – i.e., sites with recently updated content. This total includes not only sites run solely by Google, but also sites the company operates on behalf of third parties via services like Blogger, Google Docs, and Google App Engine.

Google does not discuss GWS. In the past, some reports have indicated that it’s based on Apache. But in a 2007 web post, über Googler Matt Cutts indicated otherwise. “That’s not correct,” he wrote. “I believe GWS is a custom web server, not a modified version of Apache.”

According to the survey, Apache is still dominating the game of webservers.

Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 – January 2010

Some of the other interesting facts from the survey includes:

Totals for Active Servers Across All Domains June 2000 – January 2010

Market Share for Top Servers Across the Million Busiest Sites September 2008 – January 2010

To read more about the survey read this

“The IIS SEO Toolkit helps Web developers, hosting providers, and Web server administrators to improve their Web site’s relevance in search results by recommending how to make the site content more search engine-friendly. The IIS SEO Toolkit helps to improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines, control how search engines access and display Web content, and inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing,” revealed Eric Rezabek, senior product manager IIS/Web.

Customers will find that Microsoft has developed the IIS SEO Toolkit to act much in the same manner as any search engine would, when it comes down to crawling a website. But, as far as this tool is concerned, the magic only starts after the crawling is done. The IIS SEO Toolkit features a number of components designed to give as much control as possible to customers, including a Site Analysis module, the Robots Exclusion module, and the Sitemaps and Site Indexes module. The toolkit will start by performing an exhaustive analysis of a website, but will deliver recommendations, guidance and even editing tools to deal with SEO problems as well as with Robots and Sitemaps files management tasks.

Below, you will be able to find a list with all the features that the IIS SEO Toolkit brings to the table, according to Microsoft:

“Site Analysis Features:

- Fully featured crawler engine
- Configurable number of concurrent requests to allow users to crawl their Web site without incurring additional processing. This can be configured from 1 to 16 concurrent requests.
- Support for Robots.txt, allowing you to customize the locations where the crawler should analyze and which locations should be ignored.
- Support for Sitemap files allowing you to specify additional locations to be analyzed.
- Support for overriding ‘noindex’ and ‘nofollow’ metatags to allow you to analyze pages to help improve customer experience even when search engines will not process them.
- Configurable limits for analysis, maximum number of URLs to download, and maximum number of kilobytes to download per URL.
- Configurable options for including content from only your directories or the entire site and sub domains.
- View detailed summary of Web site analysis results through a rich dashboard
- Feature rich Query Builder interface that allows you to build custom reports
- Quick access to common tasks
- Display of detailed information for each URL
- View detailed route analysis showing unique routes to better understand the way search engines reach your content

Robots Exclusion Features:

- Display of robots content in a friendly user interface
- Support for filtering, grouping, and sorting
- Ability to add ‘disallow’ and ‘allow’ paths using a logical view of your Web site from the result of site analysis processing
- Ability to add sitemap locations

Sitemap and Sitemap Index Features:

- Display of sitemaps and sitemap index files in a simple user interface
- Support for grouping and sorting
- Ability to add/edit/remove sitemap and sitemap index files
- Ability to add new URL’s to sitemap and sitemap index files using a physical or logical view of your Web site
- Ability to register a sitemap or sitemap index into the robots exclusion file.”

Source: News Softpedia.com

When the wrong goal is selected, SEO energy gets invested in the wrong ways and the ROI on the SEO project ends up being lower. Let’s look at a few examples of non-optimal goals.

Rankings

This remains a popular goal for many businesses. People frequently contact us and let us know that their goal is to rank number one for a particular search term. The problem with this goal: new businesses generally don’t get top rankings.

Imagine that they succeed at their goal of ranking number one for their term. Perhaps they increase their Web site sales by 10 percent as a result. This is indeed a good result, right?

But, what if they could have taken the same SEO energy and increased relevant traffic to the site by 20 percent, and grown sales by 20 percent? With 70 percent of the relevant traffic to a site generally coming from long tail terms, this scenario is actually pretty likely.

The SEO strategy to drive relevant long tail traffic isn’t the same as it is to drive a single term to the number one position. So would you prefer a 20 percent increase in business or a 10 percent increase? Granted, we shouldn’t discount the branding value of being number one, but most businesses would rather get the extra cash.

Traffic

A lot of companies focus on increasing their traffic. This is closer to the right goal, but many companies can also run into problems here. The problems with it were outlined very nicely by Market Motive’s John Marshall in “Don’t Buy Traffic, Buy Intent.”

Imagine that you could double the traffic to your Web site. Sounds good, right?

Well, if the traffic isn’t relevant, it might not be so good. Maybe you end up with only a 10 percent increase in sales. Whereas if you bring in 20 percent more traffic that has strong buying intent, you might be able to increase sales by 20 percent. Which would you choose?

“X” New Links Per Month

This is a popular goal. Some people believe that they need 50 new links per month. The cousin of this is seeking out a target cost per link, which I covered in “Cost Per Link is a Bad Metric.”

If someone tells me that they will be happy if we give them 50 links per month, I can contract that work out to India for $500 or so, give them 100 links per month, do no work at all (because our contractors doubled their goal), and look like a hero (for a while).

The problem is that those 100 links may have marginal results on their business, and really do little to grow it. Also bear in mind that in the world of link building that one link can easily be worth 10,000 times more than another link, if it’s from an authoritative and relevant site.

The other danger to this metric is that it can push you mentally down the path of buying links. That is a dangerous game to play, and one you should avoid.

Summary

The problem with poorly selected goals is that it focuses your energy in the wrong directions. Sadly, we have a grim example unfolding in front of us of how a poorly selected set of goals can come back haunt you. I’m referring to the current recession, which was clearly driven by sales-at-any-cost goals, resulting in a lot of financial institutions taking on bad debt (because it increased sales), which looked great until they couldn’t collect on the debt.

This idea of picking the right goals applies almost anywhere you look in life. In the world of SEO, you need to tie your SEO goals as tightly as you can to the broader goals of your business.

If your goal is to increase sales, leads, or impressions (for advertising-based sites), tie your SEO goals to those metrics. You’ll be glad that you did.

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3635924

What makes this change so important is that the future of search, whether it be Search “2.0″ or Caffeine oriented, is based on much more than the relevancy factors of content, links, queries and relevant infrastructure. This new “Search-o-morphis” brings factors into play which include site usability, site mobility, the presence of the site socially and also more and more offpage factors which go beyond traditional linking.

• Personalized Search Changes
• Real Time Search
• Growth of Android and Personalized Mobile Search
• Social Search
• Bing Growing into legitimate option 2

These concepts individually have an effect, but combined they leave search relevancy heading in a direction that will leave SERPs looking far different than they did in 2009.

Looking at the way these changes are making search as a whole move, SEOs are going to have to focus on two new concepts in their marketing plan in 2010:

1. Social Media
2. Mobile Search

Why is social media so important? Well, since social media is such an all encompassing metric, let’s look at one aspect of social media : the sharing of information.

In 1998, links were important in the Google Citation algorithm because links were the way that people shared information and gave recommendations online. In 1998, in order to link to something, you usually had to hardcode a link in the HTML of your website. Doing so could take minutes to code, and hours to FTP via dial up, and if someone put that much time into linking to a site … well, that site must be of value, wouldn’t it have?

With blogging, things changed. Blogging came into the forefront in 2003 with Google’s acquisition of Blogger.com and ultimately Google’s launch of AdSense; which monetized blogs and led to a new economic culture of self publishing. With anyone having the ability to launch a blog with the click of a button, any novice now had the ability to link. Links are easier to achieve, easier to manipulate and much more valuable, since the link is no longer the voice of few, but the voice of many.

Enter microblogging and socially networked sharing, with Twitter and more predominantly Facebook. If Twitter is to an HTML link what Facebook is to mass blog linking. This analogy means basically that in my opinion, Twitter will hit its early adopter plateau while almost anyone will join Facebook, connect with friends and share information with others.

What’s our point?

Our point is that if Google is to still work off of a citation based algorithm based on relevant conversations and suggestions of websites using keywords, then the engine is going to have to catch up to the world of social media. Because bloggers don’t just blog anymore, they share thoughts and relevant information on Twitter and Facebook. If Dave’s mom reads something interesting, he’ll share it on Facebook. If Loren’s wife runs across a great recipe, she may tweet it out. Hence, microblogging.

If blogging has become microblogging, then linking should become micro-linking (ie. URL Shorteners).

If Google fails to incorporate social media signals via Twitter & Facebook sharing, TinyURL’s and other conversations … then they would be ignoring the direction of the Internet.

How will social media effect search directly? Well these new changes are sending signals beyond search.

Traffic

The signal of traffic will not come simply from SERP use. The engines will be looking for how users interact with pages beyond their search product. How do they find the site? How do they share it? This can all be monitored from the methods above. Social media sites spread a ton of traffic throughout the web every day.

But traffic is not measured in terms of shear numbers, the relevance of traffic to a site can be measured via conversions (sales, sign ups, shares), bounce rate, time on site (all hail video!), diversity of traffic, whether the user revisits the site, and how the site is viewed amongst its peers and followers.

Engagement

The more users engage with a document, the more it will show up in their personalized results.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/2010-a-new-age-for-search-marketers/15711/

Many companies looking for SEO help — even those with a decent understanding of SEO — try their best to shop around, but they always end up with two simple questions:

1. What is this firm going to do for me?
2. How much do they cost?

When you’re hiring for a particular position in any business, you’re looking at that individual’s background. You aren’t just hiring them based on how much they cost, or what they say that they will (or can) do. You’re hiring them based on their resume, their references, and their history of performance.

For some reason, these basic principles get lost for people when they search for an SEO company (or hire an in-house optimizer). By selecting an agency or employee purely on cost, you could be setting yourself up for trouble ahead.

The “What” of SEO

You need to know what the scope of work is when proposals are put together for SEO efforts. That is one reason why creating a SEO request for proposal (RFP) is important.

If you were designing a Web site, or even building a house, wouldn’t you determine the scope of work? So, too, should you determine the scope of work for SEO efforts.

What needs to be done? What is the competitive landscape? What will the SEO firm do, and what internal resources will you put against the effort? Do you have a blog? Can you create one? Can you add copy to existing Web pages? Can you create new pages of content? Who writes the content? Can structural changes be made to your Web site? Will the SEO firm provide link building? Will social media marketing be part of the project?

The “How” of SEO

So, now that you’ve developed a scope of work, let’s assume that two different firms send proposals that look similar. It’s safe to assume that different SEO firms have a different approach/process to how they work.

Does the SEO firm have a process that they follow? Is their methodology for link building ethical? Does the SEO firm work to help you enhance your Web presence, or are they vague in telling you how they will go about their business?

Transparency in SEO is important. If an unethical individual does something to your site that’s against search engine guidelines, you’re still the one responsible for your site’s content, and it will be your site that’s penalized.

The “Who” of SEO

Let’s assume that you’re still looking at two similar proposals. It’s the individuals working on your SEO who will determine the success of this effort.

This is a major reason why some SEO companies charge $300 per month and others charge $10,000 per month. A recent graduate is going to cost a lot less than a 10-year SEO veteran. That’s just a fact.

If you were hiring for any other position in your company, this would make perfect sense to you. For some reason, this is lost when people are “comparison shopping” SEO companies.

Even after considering the “who,” it also boils down to how much of that individual’s time you can afford. SEO companies are a service-based business. They’re selling their time.

Certainly, they will have tools that they pay for (and these costs are shared among the clients), but time is money. And some people’s time costs more than other people’s time. You should also consider all the time that these seasoned professionals have put into research, reading, studying, attending conferences, and otherwise honing their craft.

The “Who” and “How” are Every Bit as Important as the “What”

If you were to hire a company that was less than ethical (their approach to link building was buying as many links from whatever cheap sources that they could find), or put individuals on your project that had perhaps a handful of SEO efforts under their belt, or work was outsourced to individuals that don’t even work for the company that you’ve hired, that is arguably more important to know than the “what.” Keep this in mind as you’re going through the challenge of hiring an SEO company or an individual.

Check references, see rankings for yourself (against keywords that “matter”), get information on the individuals who would be working on the efforts, and talk to the company about their process. Think of this in the same manner that you might if you were interviewing an individual for any other position with your company.

You want someone with high integrity, energy, enthusiasm, a likeable personality, and a good approach to business. They should have a solid understanding of the job that you’re hiring them for, and a plan for success.

Source: http://twa.lk/48k6x

Universal search feature adds more suggested search terms beneath the Google search box after you’ve typed in your search query. So instead of getting the answers to search specific search query on the results page itself, the answer to search query can now be displayed below the suggested terms. This feature is of course available only for search queries with direct and specific answers.

Google has also introduced a new Google Chrome Extension called Quick Scroll. What this Chrome extension does is to let you use Google search features even after you leave the search results pages – that is after you’ve clicked on a search results link and you are now actually on the search result. Quick Scroll will display a small black box on the lower right portion of the screen.  This box contains snippets of text culled from the page content that you viewing. And these texts are clickable and are anchored on specific parts of the page. It’s like a research assistant. You can use this feature only if you’ve installed Google Chrome 4 beta and have enabled the Chrome Extension feature.

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-rolls-out-universal-search-suggest-quick-scroll-chrome-extension/15420/

• Why you want to hire a professional SEO?

• Is Search Engine Optimization really difficult?

The basic idea behind the SEO process is Internet Marketing. Just put down your business, products and services on internet as website. After search engine optimization process done, your website will be appearing at the top and the internet user who really wants to these services they can easily reach on it and you can achieve your goal.

Search engine optimization (SEO) changes your web pages so search engines can index and rank them better. You do this by modifying the HTML (the code) so search engines can easily navigate the page and identify significant words. You also add content (pages of text) so the search engines have something to index and rank. Thus your target audience will be able to find you when they are researching their interests. The goal is not just to get #1 ranking. The goal is sales. You measure success by showing an increase in leads, conversions or sales.

I am providing vast amount of valuable affordable and professional SEO help that increase 90% of internet traffic to your website. My SEO experience and expertise are take right decision to your website business optimization and increase the targeted traffic from internet.

Contact me to know more about latest SEO technique and how to increase your website traffics.

The link building component of your SEO strategy can be the most important, as well as the most difficult and time consuming, task that you undertake.

A firm foundation of quality links will help you achieve your goals, unless you’re already a large brand and have tons of natural links.

For many SEO companies and individuals, the solution is simple: buy links. And, as many already know, this is expressly prohibited in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

I won’t lie. I’ve seen paid links work and deliver results more often than I’ve seen them hurt a company.

I saw one Web site go from basically “nowhere” in the rankings to top rankings for some highly competitive keywords within three months (from 600 organic visitors per month to more than 8,000 organic visitors per month) because they spent approximately $1,500 per month on paid links. Within one year, they had more than 80,000 visitors from organic search per month. And, they had little help from their domain name, which didn’t include their keywords.

But, at what cost, long term?

I’ve also seen paid links badly hurt companies. By “hurt,” I mean rankings went away. Completely. So, keep that in mind.

This company could find their rankings gone tomorrow. Then again, some might argue that their Web site wasn’t worth much before the paid links, so why not?

If you care about your brand and care about using your domain for the long-term, you might want to just keep to a measured “white hat” approach to your link building activities. It will take longer. It’s harder. And, it will be difficult to get things like good anchor text in your backlinks.

But there are safe approaches to link building you should consider.

Directories

It’s almost contrary to what I’ve mentioned above. These links cost money, most of the time (so, you’d want to call them “paid links,” right?).

But, these directory listings are still OK in the eyes of Google because…well, actually, who knows? They are paid links, but because it’s a directory, it’s OK? Weird, huh? Mr. Matt Cutts, please comment below with your thoughts here. I’m sure everyone would appreciate your take on this.

So, if you’re going to list yourself within a directory, here are a few standards to start with:

• DMOZ — The Open Directory project has been around for ages. It’s a free directory, but it can be difficult to get listed within. The editors at DMOZ work for free and, because of this, may not be too concerned about checking their accounts often or moving to get your listing approved, up and running. As with other things in life, if you work hard enough, you will probably get listed. You just need to find out who the assigned editor is for the category. If there is no assigned editor, perhaps you could apply to be an editor for the category. Otherwise, keep working backwards through the breadcrumb (go to the next level up from the page that you’re targeting) and find an editor working within that section. For example, there is a different editor for the Search Engine Optimization Firms section than for the Promotion section. If you aren’t having any luck with correspondence to the editor for the specific section, work your way back up through the chain (Promotion, then Web Design and Development, etc.).
• Yahoo Business Directory — $299 per year.
• Business.com — $299 per year.
• Best of the Web — $99.95 per year or one-time fee of $299.95

There are probably other good directories within your industry that you should consider.

Press Releases

Distribute a well-written press release, with keyword usage in anchor text of the press release, through channels such as MarketWire, BusinessWire, PRWeb, and a host of others.

Partners, Vendors, Friends and Family

If you buy products from them, perhaps they’ll link to you. If you sell their products, they might link to you. If you’re friends with the CEO, perhaps they’ll link to you.

You get the idea. This is where the phone, as an SEO tool, can be helpful.

Social Media Marketing and Blogging

Far and away, this is my favorite method of developing natural links to a Web site. Cutts’ advise is to have content that it compelling and that people will naturally want to link to.

Some would say, “My content on my commercial Web site isn’t compelling. Who would want to link to that?”

Exactly.

If you can create a blog (preferably on a subdirectory of your Web site), and write compelling content (complete with images and other things that will make the post interesting) and promote this through social media channels (having a MIXX account with no “friends” won’t help you much), you’ll begin to gain the kind of natural links that can, over time, help you get the kind of link popularity that you need to be successful.

Meet Mark Jackson at SES Chicago on December 7-11, 2009, when he discusses “SEO Through Blogs and Feeds” on Monday, December 7, 2009. Now in its 11th year, the only major Search Marketing Conference and Expo in the Midwest will be packed with 70+ sessions covering PPC management, keyword research, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media, local, mobile, link building, duplicate content, video optimization and usability, while offering high-level strategy, keynotes, an exhibit floor, networking events and more.

The above image shows two same search engine results page (SERP) listings, with different display URLs: the one on the top is the direct display of the page URL while the one below is what’s happening – site hierarchies display URL.

Google has announced site hierarchies display in the Display URL positions, which replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website.

The new hierarchies display provides valuable context and new navigation options. The changes are rolling out now and should be available globally in the next few days. Well optimized sites would have their SERP listings enhanced by showing the hierarchies. Why?

Site hierarchy display URL provides more information to the searchers, making the site stand out. Not to mention the bolded keywords in the display URL if you do it right.

How Does Google Get Site Hierarchies Information for Display?

Breadcrumb Navigation on FT.com

Webmasters frequently show a navigational tool called “breadcrumb” above the main content to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, Google is able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results.

It remains a question mark now whether and what will be replaced with if a page does not have breadcrumb. Should you build breadcrumbs navigation for Google?

Benefits of Breadcrumbs Navigation

No. You should not. But, you should build one for your users.

• Breadcrumbs make it easier for users to move around the site
• When the main navigation doesn’t quite meet their needs, users turn to breadcrumbs.
• Breadcrumbs show people their current location helping them understand where they are
• Breadcrumbs never cause problems in user testing
• Breadcrumbs take up very little space on the page

Other than the usability benefits, breadcrumbs can boost your search engine rankings, the SEO benefit.

How to Build Good Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are easy to build with a horizontal line that progresses from the highest level (homepage) to the lowest (the current page), one step at a time.

Use a simple text link for each level; it’s best to include keywords in the text. Don’t make it too long, though. And, use a simple, one-character separator between the levels (like “>” or “-”).