Half Day SEO Course for Journalists in London - total £75,  11th October 2009

How often do you go beyond the first page of Google when reading on internet?

According to research less than 10 % people go beyond the first page while searching on the internet. So without understanding the principle of SEO your news copy may end up on page 3 or 4 and out of your reader's sight.  This half day practical course will introduce you the search engines optimisation (SEO) in the simplest way and can help you to push your news copy on the first page of Google.

Your satisfaction is guaranteed.

Course tutor: Subodh Gupta

Date: Sunday 11^th October, 2009
Time: 1:15 pm -5pm
Venue: Hammersmith (2 min walk from Hammersmith tube station) London

Number of places left: 5
Cost: £75 total

Prior Knowledge: Absolute beginners are welcome                                                                                                                                             How to reserve: Please contact at 07966275913

Key learning outcomes include:

• What Journalist need to know about SEO?
• How Journalist can keep their stories on the first page of Google?
• 7 Steps for Search Engine Optimisation ?
• Writing for the web: principles and techniques;
• Search Engine Reputation Management

About Subodh Gupta

Subodh Gupta is an SEO consultant and author of the book “Search Engine Optimisation Simplified” available at Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and Water stones, Borders, etc. 

Prior to this, he worked as the guest professor to various MBA Schools in India and he has a Masters in Consultancy Management. More about Subodh Gupta at http://www.subodhgupta.co.uk/pages/About-Us.html

 

Yahoo is shutting down another of his web property and this time it is GeoCities.

GeoCities free web hosting has been one of the very few free hosting on the internet and widely known though not used much anymore. Yahoo has also sent an email in this regard.

GeoCities was launched during 90’s and offered a great place for aspiring webmasters to launch websites.  I still remember that how proud one felt when somebody opened a site with Geocities in the early days of internet and inform everybody.

Yahoo, is the owner of GeoCities, and has finally decided to close the site. Yahoo has announced that GeoCities will cease to function on October 26, 2009.

Yahoo is also encouraging webmaster who are having sites on Geocities to upgrade to Yahoo webhosting and also offering a great discount.

Yahoo Launched new Video and Images search ads

To get out from the boring search ads format of, a headline, a line of ad copy, a link, Yahoo has made the first innovative move to ensure that search ads could show more.

With Yahoo new Rich Ads in Search, one can add vedio and image within the search ads.

Yahoo has been testing the service that lets advertisers add video, images and custom search boxes to their search ads. In fact according to Yahoo search marketing blog a small group of advertisers tested it in the fourth quarter of 2008 and saw click-through rates rise by as much as 25 percent.

At the moment the Rich Ads in Search program is being shared with a small number of brand advertisers such as Pedigree and Esurance and agencies such as Razorfish.  Currently Rich Ads in Search is by invitation only.

Following is the screen shot of yahoo search ads for the keyword esurance.

Yahoo has recently announced that it will shut down its MyWeb service on March 18,2009. The reason they have cited is because of Yahoo’s streamlining process this year.

My Web is a social bookmarking website launched by Yahoo in 2005. It allows users to bookmark a web page, along with a description. The user also have the option of adding tags so that other users can search for tags and see the bookmarked site.

However it was not as popular as Yahoo’s Delicious and the recently enhanced Yahoo! Bookmarks. So, it is logical that Yahoo took a decision to shuts down its MyWeb service and focussed on existing popular one.

For those who are using MyWeb, Yahoo has offered the option of  transferring  their MyWeb information – to their Yahoo Bookmarks or to Delicious following simple steps.

 

First let’s understand what canonical or canonical url means.

Canonical : it means simple or basic  or accepted as true without the need for proof.

Canonical url:  The primary url that we want to use is known as the Canonical URL.  In the world of search engines duplicate content is prohibited. Google applied penalty if several domain or url within your site pointing at the same content in your site.

The most common problem of duplicate content can be in the ecommerce website. An ecommerce site might allow various parameters for a webpage for example by lowest price, highest rated etc. You may have 50 pages, but may be 10 URLs for each page and now search engines have to sort through 500 URLs.

This could also lead to another problem as less of your site may get crawled because search engine crawlers use a limited amount of bandwidth on each website (based on many factors). So if the crawler is able to crawl only 50 pages of your site in a single visit, you want it to be 50 unique pages, not 5 pages 10 times each.

You can find here more information on Canonicalization by Matt Cutts.

Now the latest news: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft agreed in a major drive to clean up the duplicate contents. Now the top search engines are implementing support for the new HTML tag - “<link>”.

The <link> tag will tell search engine crawlers which canonical URL form it should use when retrieving search results.

The <link> tag also put the Canonical URL at the forefront of the website content which will be used for accessing the page, regardless of the session id, link parameter, sort parameter, parameter order of the URL form.

To implement Canonical URL form on the website is quite easy, as the site owners just need to add the following link tag at head section of the site’s HTML.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.xyz.com/products” />

Although this <link>tag been around for a long time and used for link stylesheets but not used so for the canonical url. So the new aspect now is the “canonical” part in the “rel” attribute. I think if you have done the CSS course perhaps you will easy to understand the <link> tag.

Google has imposed a penalty on Google Japan for paying bloggers to write about them and link to Google Japan services.

The Google Japan team took a marketing initiative of paying bloggers for reviews, that turned out to be paid links,
and interestingly they did not realise that it was against Google's guidelines.

Although Google Japan is a part of Google however Google Penalize Google Japan by dropping their PageRank from a 9 to a 5.

I think it is interesting to see as how long the penalty last on google sister site. In Japan the top search engine is Yahoo Japan which is seperate entity from Yahoo USA and Google wants to narrow that lead.

It is good idea for Google to show self governance and in a way sending strong message to others that buying links can be severly penalized.

Now google has launched new social web blog. According to google you may have friends  in one or more social networks, social applications which work on only a few sites, and you have to remember multiple usernames and passwords.

For making it easier google is developing tools to make "any app, any site, any friends" a reality.

Google is launching this blog for anyone who is interested or want to get involved in helping to make the web more social.

According to google"Whether you own a site and want to add social features to increase community engagement, or you're developing a great social application, this blog is for you."

Google will write about social initiatives within Google, such as Google Friend Connect, as well as community efforts like OpenSocial.

Google will also be sharing some success stories, present tips and tricks, and will provide updates when there are new developments.