Industry says its an answer of Google to Facebook. However, it is really unfair to say this at this point, its just a launch but one thing for sure that FB has got a big competitor now. With the launch of Google+ project, Facebook also have declared their video chat option powered by Skype.

Google plus vs Facebook

Google plus features –

1. Big Font Social Networking
2. Circles – You can now do grouping of the peoples based on your choice like friends, family, colleges etc.
3. Hangouts – With this feature, you can do group video chats. Truly a great feature.
4. Instant Image Uploads – your picks and videos upload themselves automatically from your mobile phone to your private album on Google+.
5. Sparks
6. Huddles – Huddle turns all those different conversations into one simple group chat, so everyone gets on the same page all at once.
7. +1 button
8. Gmail connection – You can directly open G+ through your Gmail account with the notifications from your G+ circles.
9. Faster Interface – Google+ is much more faster than Facebook. Try it.

Facebook features –

1. Small Font Social Networking
2. Wall Posts
3. Like button
4. Image and Video Uploads with Tagging
5. Video Calling Feature – New feature
6. Facebook Pages

Google Voice Search -

Google Voice

To experience this search speech-to-text option, you just need a built-in or attached microphone in your desktop and then just click the mic in the search bar and start talking to searchanything in Google.com

Google Search by Image -

You can see this feature by a camera icon in Google image search bar. Google Search by Image feature provide you searching your relevant images through three options -

1. Drag and drop an image from the web or your computer into the Google image search box,
2. Put an image URL, and
3. By uploading an image.

To search by image even faster or want to make in habit, you can download the Chrome extension or theFirefox extension. With this extension installed, you can simply right-click an image on the web to search Google with that image.

A number of ground rules for getting your page rank high in the top 10 search results on the internet.

• SEO-Friendly Design

Prior to making a start; plan the constitution of your site first. It ought to be simple to be revealed and enclose text links to the entire site’s special pages.

• Competitive examination

Explore a little to hit upon forums where your target market gathers around and distinguish what problems they are having. Have a look at contenders and observe what appears to be working for them.

• Keyword exploration

Your keyword research must be done properly. Do not just aim broad keywords as you will most certainly not start ranking for them, anytime shortly. Relatively target long-tail keywords with considerably lesser amount of rivalry and you will start seeing rankings, quickly.

• Submit To Article Sites

Write down some exclusive articles, each targeting one primary keyword. You can also work in some secondary keywords however ensure your most important keyword is integrated in the title with at least 1% density all through your article. In your resource box you can place one or two links

• Include fresh Content repeatedly

Google is constantly on the lookout for fresh content and if your site gets reorganized pretty regularly, in that case, Google will be all over it.

• Carry out Promotion Online & Offline

Offline promotion is not essential in the start, however it can make a substantial difference soon after. Online you must keep in mind to make your promotions come out as usual as achievable, as nobody likes overt selling and over-hyping.

• Stay advanced With SEO developments

Up-to-the-minute progresses are continuously made with hardware, software, internet services as well as Google’s algorithms. It is highly advisable to sign up, at least one internet technology newsletter to keep up-to-date with the latest Google trends. This will always keep you one step forward of your contenders.

Search engine optimization is the process which can help your targeted visitors to visit your website through high keyword rankings in Google. There are lots of SEO WordPress plugins available on the web which can help in customizing your blog and making your blog more search engine friendly. We are including here some of the top SEO plugins for your WordPress blog -

1. All in one SEO Pack – The most popular SEO plugin on internet for WordPress blogs.
2. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
3. WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by the legacy caching engine. Static files are served to:
   • Users who are not logged in.
   • Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
   • Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.
4. WP-PageNavi -Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.
5. SEO friendly Images – SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.
6. SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

How to design an SEO friendly website?

We should understand one thing before applying any optimization technique that our objective should be, making our website more user-friendly. But rankings are also essential to get business from the website which can be done by making it friendly with search engine robots. Here are the guidelines -

1. Give More Importance to Content – Content and content is the only basic food of search engine robots. So, avoid flash animations and images as much as you can. Make your website a keyword rich web site.
2. Page Load Speed – Try to make your web pages light. If you have heavy data, divide that page into 2-3 pages to get the best load speed. It is also necessary in terms of visitors’ flexibility.
3. Validate your code and make it more refined.
4. Browser Compatibility – Check your website design that it should be compatible with all known web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, IE, Google Chrome etc.
5. Say NO to Frames – Search engine spiders are unable to read frames. So, there is no use having frame based website.
6. Search engine friendly navigation – Your website navigation should be user-friendly but also search engine friendly i.e. every link placement should be readable by search engine robots. JavaScripts and Flash navigation can’t work if you are optimizing your website to get top rankings.
7. Alt Tag placement - Make sure to use alt attribute to your all images. Alt tag should be relevant and descriptive to your image. In this way, it will be readable and you can get benefit in getting placement in Search engine image search results.
8. Convert your dynamic pages into static web pages – If you have a dynamic nature website, try to get an alternate or opt for a CMS which makes SEO friendly web pages. Not every search engine is able to crawl dynamic web pages.
9. Provide a Sitemap to your users and search engine robots.
10. Check broken links and all typographical errors.

If you are interested in having an SEO friendly website design and want to rank high in Google. Please feel free to contact us.

How would you explain “The Power of Keyword Domains” to someone looking to take a decision what kind of domain to go for?” This was a question by McDot from Berlin in Webmaster Help Forum. Google guy Matt Cutts recently answered this question through his video.

He said

Its definitely definitely possible to succeed without keywords in your domain name.

and mentioned many examples of successful websites like Facebook.com, Twitter.com, Google.com and Yahoo.com. These all big brands have no target keywords in the domain names and they succeed very well in the market.

He also says, that some people have complained that Google is giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. He declares that

we have been thinking about at adjusting that mix a bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm, so that given 2 different domains it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain name with a bunch of keywords in it.

Wired published an interview with Google guys – Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts which revealed the actual name of this new algorithm update i.e. Google Panda Update.  Google named it Panda because of the key man for this new algorithm change whose name is ‘Panda”.

Here’s some edited transcript from Wired interview with Google for this algorithm change.

Wired.com: What’s the code name of this update? Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has been calling it “Farmer” because its apparent target is content farms.

Amit Singhal: Well, we named it internally after an engineer, and his name is Panda. So internally we called a big Panda. He was one of the key guys. He basically came up with the breakthrough a few months back that made it possible.

Wired.com: How do you recognize a shallow-content site? Do you have to wind up defining low quality content?

Singhal: That’s a very, very hard problem that we haven’t solved, and it’s an ongoing evolution how to solve that problem. We wanted to keep it strictly scientific, so we used our standard evaluation system that we’ve developed, where we basically sent out documents to outside testers. Then we asked the raters questions like: “Would you be comfortable giving this site your credit card? Would you be comfortable giving medicine prescribed by this site to your kids?”

Cutts: There was an engineer who came up with a rigorous set of questions, everything from. “Do you consider this site to be authoritative? Would it be okay if this was in a magazine? Does this site have excessive ads?” Questions along those lines.

So, beware of this Panda who hates the farms.

Google PageRank Bar

SEOs and Webmasters do many techniques to achieve a good PageRank for their websites. It is believed that high PageRank will help in attaining good positioning in Google. You can check your Google PR by Google Toolbar. For it, you need to download it from here – http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/toolbar/ff/index.html

However, if you are searching for an online tool to check your websites’ Google PageRank, then check the following online PageRank checkers -

1. PRChecker.info – http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
2. SEOMoves.org – http://www.seomoves.org/blog/tools/google-pagerank-checker/
3. Bthomson.com – http://pagerank.bthomson.com/
4. Iwebtool.com – http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker
5. Multipagerank.com – http://multipagerank.com/

International Women’s Day (8 March) is a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. And for this special day, Google has linked its doodle to their event page i.e. http://www.google.com/events/iwd2011/ for women’s causes and celebrate women’s achievements.

There Google invites everybody to donate to one of the incredible organizations that work to improve the lives of women worldwide. Attend this bridge event or check in virtually with the link through the Google homepage logo today.

On 24th Feb again Google announced the improvements taken place in the Google search results -

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on. This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful.

Google have compared the Blocklist data gathered through the Personal Blocklist Chrome Extension to make the necessary changes. For now, we can see changes in Google U.S. search results only but will be rolled out soon everywhere. It is sure to see some ups and downs in the rankings if you have website targeted U.S. market.

We can see, G has clear intentions to stop Search Spam and only high-quality sites (websites with original content and information) will rank on the page 1.