Google and Bing Hit All Time Highs As Desktop Search action Rebounds

Google and Bing both punch all time highs in United States search market distribute in October, while overall desktop search activity was up 8% from the month before according to comScore’s October 2012 search activity/rankings report.

Google’s market share rose two-tenths of a point, from 66.7% in September to 66.9%  in October. Bing gained a tenth of a point and reached 16% in October. Both of those numbers represent all-time highs using comScore’s estimates. While Yahoo was static for the month

Google Adds Medications in Its Knowledge Graph

Google today announced that it will source the data from sources like the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, the US Food & Drug Administration, the Dept. of Veterans Affairs and others.
Google has created a number of health-related search features over the years, including a health OneBox that’s been around since August 2009. It shows up on a variety of medical-related searches, from conditions to symptoms to, yes, medications.

Google also contributed that the new Knowledge Graph display for medications is replacing the previous medication OneBox display, and this is still rolling out so all users may not see it quite yet.

http://ask4seo.blogspot.in/

Using The “News Keywords” Tag For Google News

Google launched the news keywords tag in September, designed as a way for news publishers to work around the fact that often the key terms they want their stories to be found for don’t make it into the story headlines.
The primary reason for this are two-fold. First, it can sometimes be awkward or make a headline lengthy to ensure the most relevant terms someone might search for appear within a headline.
Second, there are plenty of journalists who simply can’t get idea that they are writing for digital, where descriptive headlines are crucial, and instead want to stick with headlines that make more sense when seen in the overall context of a printed page.

Bing's New Webmaster Guidelines

Bing has published its first set of webmaster guidelines, offering website owners general guidance on best practices related to SEO for Bing’s search engine.

> Content - Content is what Bing is seeks

> Links - Bing wants to see links grow organically, and abuses to this such as buying links or participating in link schemes (link farms, etc.) lead to the value of such links being deprecated.

>Social -   If you are influential socially, this leads to your followers sharing your information widely, which in turn results in Bing seeing these positive signals.  These positive signals can have an impact on how you rank organically in the long run.


> Indexation - The main pathways to being indexed are:

• Links to your content help Bing find it, which can lead us to index your content
• Use of features within Bing Webmaster Tools such as Submit URL and Sitemap Upload are also ways to ensure we are aware of your content

> Technical - Here it checks Site's page load time, robots.txt, redirects, canonical tags

> SEO 

• title tags – keep these clear and relevant
• meta description tags – keep these clear and relevant, though use the added space to expand on the

Google Webmaster Tools Security Bug Re-Opens Access To Old Accounts

A security bug in Google Webmaster Tools has given users access to old accounts and websites that they’re no longer supposed to be able to access.

Webmaster Tools accounts is that users are finding themselves with sudden access to accounts that they once had access to, but no longer do; i.e., former clients, employers and the like. That bug is presumably giving a lot of power to individuals that shouldn’t have it — power to deindex, disavow links, unverify the current/legitimate webmaster’s access, and even redirect sites to other verified domains in the user’s account. It also reveals a lot of link, search, index/crawl and other data to users that shouldn’t be able to see those things.

 

This is a serious problem and Google’s silence on it so far suggests that they’re still trying to sort out what’s happening and why — and how to fix it.

Google fixed this issue and according to them, Google Analytics was not impacted.

Rank Your Name in Google Using Social Media

Want to rank better in Google? If you’re an individual, you could build your own site and hope it does well. But you might have more success by creating a page for yourself on a social media site like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Ranking On Google: The Social Media way

> Create your business profile on social media websites like linked in, twitter etc. and promote this page.

> Create your business page on Facebook, Google+ etc and contribute here daily with latest updates

> Create profile and participate in other sites like SEOmoz and participate in posts related to your business.

> Create your profile in naymz to check your Online Reputation in search engines and social media websites

Tips to Decrease Webpage Load Time

The following are some tips for decreasing your web page loading times.
1. Check the Current Speed of the Website

The first thing you will want to do is to analyze your current page speed. This allows you to track your improvement and ensure that any changes you make positively improves your page load times.

There are many free tools out there for checking how long it takes to load your website. Here are a few of them:

    Pingdom offers an easy-to-use site speed test that mimics that way a page is loaded in a web browser.
    Page Speed is an open source Firefox add-on that helps you assess the performance of your web pages. It also provides suggestions on how to fix performance issues.
    Web Page Test is another great tool that shows you the speed and performance of your website in different browsers.

2. Optimize Your Images

Know when to use the appropriate file format for your images. Changing to a different file format can dramatically decrease the file size of an image.

    GIF is ideal for images with few colors like logos.
    JPEG is great for images with lots of colors and details like photographs.
    PNG is the choice when you need high quality transparent images.

Check out these resources to learn more about optimizing images:

    The Comprehensive Guide to Saving Images for the Web
    JPEG 101: A Crash Course Guide on JPEG
    Web Designer’s Guide to PNG Image Format
    8 Excellent Tools for Optimizing Your Images

3. Don’t Scale Down Images

Avoid using a larger image than you need just because you can set the width and height attributes of elements in HTML.

If you need a 100x100px image and you have a 700x700px image, use an image editor like Photoshop or one of these web-based image editors to resize the image to the needed dimensions. This lowers the file size of the image, thus helping to decrease page loading times.
4. Compress and Optimize Your Content

The task of compressing your website content can have a huge impact on reducing load times. When using HTTP compression, all of your web page data is sent in a single smaller file instead of a request that is full of many different files. For more information, see this Wikipedia article on HTTP Compression.

You can also optimize and compress your JavaScript and CSS files by combining them and minifying the source code.
5. Put Stylesheet References at the Top

Moving your stylesheet references to the of your HTML document helps your pages feel like it is loading faster because doing so allows your pages to render the styles progressively. In addition, it doesn’t hurt that it’s the W3C standard.
6. Put Script References at the Bottom

Browsers can only download two components per hostname at the same time. If you add your scripts towards the top, it would block anything else below it on the initial loading of the page. This makes it feel like the page is loading slower.

To avoid this situation, place script references as far down the HTML document as possible, preferably right before the closing tag.
7. Place JavaScript and CSS in External Files

If your JavaScript and CSS are directly in your HTML document, they are downloaded every time an HTML document is requested. This, then, doesn’t take advantage of browser caching and increases the size of the HTML document.

Always place your CSS and JavaScript in external files; it’s a best practice and makes your site easier to maintain and update.
8. Minimize HTTP Requests

When visiting a new web page, most of the page-loading time is spent downloading components of that page (e.g. images, stylesheets, and scripts).

By minimizing the number of requests a web page needs to make, it will load faster. To reduce HTTP requests for images, one thing you can do is to use CSS sprites to combine multiple images.

If you have multiple stylesheets and JavaScript libraries, consider combining them to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
9. Cache Your Web Pages

If you use a content management system that dynamically generates your web pages, you should statically cache your web pages and database queries so that you can decrease the strain on your server as well as speed up page rendering times.

When you cache your page, it saves a static version of it to be presented to the user instead of recreating it every time it’s requested.

For WordPress, check out WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache (also read this WordPress codex entry on optimizing/caching WordPress). Drupal core has native caching.
10. Reduce 301 Redirects
Every time a 301 redirect is used, it forces the browser to a new URL which increases page-loading times. If possible, avoid using 301 redirects.

New Index Status Feature In Webmaster Tools

Google has introduced new feature in its webmaster “Index Status Feature” under the Health menu. After clicking on it you’ll see a graph which shows how many pages are currently indexed. If you have increasing number of indexed pages, then new content on your site is being discovered, crawled and indexed by Google.

However, some of you may find issues that require looking a little bit deeper. For this Google added “Advanced feature” in this. From here you can know about total indexed pages, ever crawled pages, not selected pages to index by Google, and pages blocked by robots. Notice that the counts are always totals.

By this feature Index Status will bring more transparency into Google’s index selection process and help you identify and fix indexing problems with your sites.

Google Now Shows You Your Most Recent Links

Google has added a new option for downloading your links in Google Webmaster Tools. You can now click on a “download latest links” button.

The latest links download option will download your links that Google Webmaster Tools discovered but do so sorted by date. Google will have the link in one column and in the other column list out the date Google discovered the link. You can now download links from Google *sorted by date*. 

This may be one of the more useful feature upgrades to the link reporting tool within webmaster tools. Being able to quickly see your most recently acquired new links might be helpful in tracking link acquisitions, as well as determining which links might have caused a penalty.

Google Webmaster’s new feature - associates to manage your YouTube presence

Almost all organizations have multiple presences on the web in different social media websites. It's important that visitors to these other properties have confidence that they are actually associated with the Webmaster Tools site.

Google webmaster announce a new feature in Webmaster Tools that allows webmasters to add "associates" -- trusted users who can act on behalf of your site in other Google products. Unlike site owners and users, associates can't view site data or take any site actions in Webmaster Tools, but they are authorized to perform specific tasks in other products.

For this initial launch, members of YouTube's partner program that have created a YouTube channel for their site can now link the two together. By doing this, your YouTube channel will be displayed as the "official channel" for your website.

To add or change associates within Webmaster Tools

1. On the Webmaster Tools home page, click the site you want.
2. Under Configuration, click Associates.
   
3. Click Add a new associate.
4. In the text box, type the email address of the person you want to add.
5. Select the type of association you want.
   
6. Click Add.
   

Management within YouTube

It’s also possible for users to request association from a site’s webmaster.

1. Log in to your YouTube partner account.
2. Click on the user menu and choose Settings > Associated Website.
3. Fill in the page you would like to associate your channel with.  
4. Click Add.        
5.  If you’re a verified owner of the site, you’re done. But if someone else in your organization manages the website, the association will be marked Pending. The owner receives a notification with an option to approve or deny the request.
   
6. After approval is granted, navigate back to this page and click Refresh to complete the association.

Through associates, webmasters can easily and safely allow others to associate their website with YouTube channels.