Google no longer lets you change domains to search different countries

Localized Searches??What does it mean?? 

For a long time now we have been toying with the Google's localized searches. We could get localized search result of any country by simply visiting different domains, like google.co.in for India, google.ae for UAE, google.uk for UK etc. BUT NO MORE ….  

Google's New Feature - What Changed??

Google country domain update (This is not the official name of this new feature) has changed the old system of localized search results. Google no longer lets you change domains to search different countries. As a result of the change when you search from a specific location, Google has added a strap in the bottom left corner to denote the country which you are searching from. Google’s will now show search results based on your current location. It doesn’t matter whichever domain you visit. That is, if you are in India and visit google.uk, you will still get a result based on India itself. 

Why the Change??

Google says that, they are making this change because 1 out of 5 searches is based/related to location, thus the company feels it’s critical to offer local information to provide the best search result. This feature mostly focuses on travelers. Google says that if you are visiting another country, the search results will be automatically based on the place you are visiting. And it will change back once you are back home after the visit. As Google says, before when travelers searched in their home countries Google domain, they may not have received the most suitable result. This feature will now apply to desktop search, mobile search, Google Maps and the iOS Google app.

BUT THE GOOD NEW IS!!!

It is still possible to avoid these localized searches. How? I will tell you how. Call it a possible solution if you can.

• Go to Google home page. Click the “Settings” button in the bottom left corner. 

• A small pop up window will appear. Select “Search Settings”.

• In the Search Settings page scroll down to the “Region Settings” portion. Then choose the country you want and click “save”. 

Like this you can easily change the country search settings. The only thing to remember is that when you clear the Cache you would have to repeat the process. But it doesn’t matter, as this is a very simple procedure.

Sulfikar K M

Google Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools

 

Out of the many SEO tools, Google Webmaster Tools is one of the most useful. This is a very useful tool set that allows you to communicate with Google and adjust many aspects of how Google sees your site, such as list the external and internal links to your site, adjust the crawl rate at which Google bot indexes your site. Here in this blog i am going to show you how to crawl, catch and Indexing the blog and post you have created. I have already created posted 2 other posts on History and Evolution of SEO and On Page Optimization. Check them out if you have any doubts about SEO or On page optimization.

 

Now for fetching your blog or site the steps you follow are.

1) First you should go to the webmaster search console page (google.com/webmaster/tools/home)

2) Copy the main URL of your website or blog and paste it in the search console next to "ADD A PROPERTY". One important thing to remember here is to make our post to ."com" version if it is in ".in" version before you copy the URL. this is done by adding ".com/ncr" to the ".in" section of URL and clicking enter.

3) Then from the next option select “HTML tag”.

By doing this a Meta tag box will appear.

4) Copy this Meta description.

5) Go the blogger section of our blog. And select “Template”. Then select “Edit HTML”.

6) Before the closing “head” section of the HTML code  paste this Meta Description.

7) Save Template.

8) Then go the search to the search console Click “Verify” after you are given a green tick.

9) Select “Continue”.

10) In the Dashboard of the search console select “crawl” option.

11) Then select “Fetch as Google” and wait for the “Fetch” option to load.

12) Select “Fetch” option

13) Then select “Request Indexing”. Select “Crawl only this URL” option.

14) Click “I am not a robot”. Then select Go.

The above was to Fetch our blog. To Fetch our post we newly created in our blog, we should do the following steps.

1) Click on our Post description or H1

One important thing to remember here is to make our post to ."com" version if it is in ".in" version before you copy the URL. this is done by adding ".com/ncr" to the ".in" section of URL and clicking enter.

2) Go to Webmaster Search console. Click on the blog we fetched to go to the dashboard section of the console.

3) Because  here we are only fetching our post, we need to copy the remaining portion of the URL. That is we need  copy the section after the ".com/". This is because we already fetched our blog first. This is only a new post.

4) Select "Crawl" .Then "Fetch as Google".

5) Paste the URL of the post. And select "Fetch".

6) After Fetching is done Select "Request Indexing".

7) Then in the next box that appears after you request for indexing select the option "URL and its Direct Links". Then select "I am not a robot" and select Go.

By doing this we complete the Fetching of our Blog. Fetching is the last Step we use after publishing a blog, this is done to crawl, catch and index our blog. If you guys have any doubts regarding this you can refer my previous post which i have gave links to, in the starting of this post.

Sulfikar K M

What is On Page SEO

On-Page Optimization

 

On-Page Optimization are modification done inside a web page to make it more crawling friendly. Through On-page optimization, we can improve the position of our web page in search rankings. These factors are controlled by you or by coding on your page. On Page optimization can be done by using actual HTML code, meta tags, keywords placement and keyword density. It includes providing good content, good keywords selection, putting keywords on correct places, giving appropriate titles to every page etc. On page Optimization depends on many factors like.

1) Title Optimization.
2) Meta Description
3) Heading Tags
4) Anchor Text Optimization.
5) Image Optimization
6) Content Optimization.
7) Keyword Optimization.
8) Authorship Optimization.

Title Optimization

 

An HTML TITLE tag is put inside the head tag. The page title (not to be confused with the heading for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window. This is the one place on a web page where your keywords must be present. Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your website is extremely important to Google, particularly for the homepage. Factors that we should keep in my while optimizing title are:
1) SEO Title should be unique. (Don’t give SEO title to any page in our website. If we do this Google will warn us for duplication.)
2) The total number of characters we can give to a search engine is 70.
3) Total number of character we can give a SEO title page is 55-60 characters. If we type 61 or 62 character it will be a regulation the pixel width regulation.
4) Capital letters have more pixel width than small letters.
5) Google SEO title page pixel width is 512.
6) SEO title page should be a meaningful sentence, Appealing and without any grammatical mistakes. 

Meta Description

HTML Meta tags are officially page data tags that lie between the open and closing head tags in the HTML code of a document. For the search engine to understand what your page is about, you need to write a good description. When Google’s algorithm decides a description is badly written or inaccurate, it will replace that description with its own version of what is on the page. Writing a good description not only helps keep Google from rewriting it, but also helps you get good more people clicking through to your site. 

  

A well-written description not only tells users what is on your page, but also entices them to visit your site. A description is what shows up here in the search engine results. It is like good window dressing. Sites with poor descriptions will get less click through and the search engines will demote your site in favor of other sites. The common belief based on what Google said in 2009, is that nothing in the description will help you get rankings. But is most important for the prospect visitor when looking at the search engine result page - this tag is often displayed there and helps you to distinguish your site from the others in the list.

Meta Description for a post or blog is 155 maximum characters. And for a web page is 155-160 characters. A post meta description will have date in the Snippet part and a web page will not. That’s why post have 155 character limit. Meta Description should not have spelling mistake or grammatical mistake.

Say you were googling the phrase “meta keywords” for example. You might encounter the following results.

Snippet = The Description part + Title part + URL part that we Google lists in the search result page.
Sandbox = Temporary Storage area (Saving Area). If our pages have mistakes, that is spelling mistake, grammatical mistake or in our page meta description and title page are different topics, Google will sent it to a temporary storage area.

Heading tags
 

Heading tags, as the name implies, are tags that are used for the creations of headings. The most important tag is the <h1> heading tag, and will usually be the title of a post.headings help Google to grasp the main topics of a long post. There are 4 headings tags-H1(Heading), H2(Sub Heading) ,H3(Minor Heading), H4(Normal heading ). There should be only one <h1> in a web page or blog. Same in the case of <h2>. But we can have maximum 4-5 <h3> and <h4>. This Optimization is important as it helps in ranking of our page.

 Anchor Text Optimization

First and very important thing to remember when giving anchor text is, never to use the focusing keyword as anchor text. Use descriptive anchor text for all your text links. Most search engines consider anchor text of incoming links when ranking pages. Anchor Text is important part, which should be selected very carefully because this text is used not only for search engines but also for navigation purpose. In this case, Anchor Text has been replaced by an image. So, while using an image in place of an anchor text, it should be checked that you have put alt tag properly. An image alt tag should have appropriate keywords.

Image Optimization

It’s important to use images related to the text of the article. This is mainly from a user experience point of you, as you don’t want to baffle people with an obtuse choice of image. Our images need to be of a good quality, in the correct aspect ratio, with good resolution and of a size large enough to be visible across devices. But if you don’t have the time or resources to do that, there are plenty of free and easy-to-use resources out there. Image Optimization emphasize the title or subject of the post. It’ll trigger a visitor to read the post, as the first view isn’t just text.
Google cannot crawl an image as itself. It identifies images by 3 methods.
1) Alt name or Alt text.
2) File name.
3) Contents near the image.
Alt name given to an image makes it easier to crawl. You can give the Alt name or text by 2 ways. One I by right clicking the image, select properties and type in the alt name. In the second way you have to go to the HTML page and type in the code to give the alt name. Example: If the alt name we want to give is “cat”. Type < img alt=”cat”>. When we give the file name of the image one thing you have to keep in mind is never use space in between words. Use “-“instead of space. And also ensure that the contents near the image are related to the image shown.


Content Optimization

Content should be unique, high quality and without duplicated or plagiarism free. It includes the text, graphics and even the links to other websites. One should never use excessive graphics because they are not search engine friendly. That is, it will make crawling process more difficult. And users also will get tired of the time taken to load the site, if they are over a slow network. High quality content means higher the ranking you achieve, larger traffic you gain and greater popularity of your website. Advantages of having good content
1) If your site is having something really unique, then people like to suggest it to their friends.
2) Other webmasters like to create a link of your site on their sites.
3) Your site visitors start trusting on your site and they look forward for the next content update and keep coming again and again.

 Creating, editing, and promoting unique high-quality content is difficult and time consuming. But in the end, the golden rule of SEO is that Content is the King. It is not because of a search engine, but it is for your site visitors.

Keyword Optimization

 Keyword search optimization is a critical step in initial stages of search engine marketing. If you do a bad job at selecting your target keyword all your subsequent efforts will be in vain. So it’s vital to get keyword optimization right. Some important things we should remember while keyword optimization are:
1) Focusing keyword is best if we use it before a “comma” or “full stop” in any paragraph of our web page. Logic is that when Google bots crawls our web page it will show down in the “comma” or “full stop” section. It will give our website a much higher chance of listing higher in results.
2) Keyword Density: It means the percentage of or how many time our focusing keyword is included or repeated in our web page.
Example: If we are using the keywords 3 times. The keyword density percentage is 3. To increase density without spamming we should increase the content of web page.
3) Keyword Consistency: It is a good practice to include difference words of our focusing keyword in density in our web page.
4) If we include our focusing keyword in the first paragraph, it is an added advantage.

Authorship Optimization

It involves creation of links from google+ to your word press, blogs or to your websites. Name of the author will displayed in the page when you give link to your google+. It increases the visibility of your page and leads to achieve more links towards your site. When we makes an article and published to the internet before ensuring or verifying authority, it is very important to the articles when crawling Google and visits the content readers. Authorship provides authority and validity to content readers. In Google authorship is established to connect with Google profile with our article. In Google plus includes our personal data and profile picture also. Through our details the viewers can understand more about the author. If we didn’t give authorship to our blog or website, our authorship value never counts or it will never increase. There are 3 steps to this optimization. On the Google plus account first change the view to older version. Then.

Step 1

1) In Google plus account go to the “About” page.
2) Then select “Edit” from “Link” section. Then add a custom link. That is add the URL to our blog or page. One important think to keep in mind when adding the URL is that, it should be in “.com” rather than “.in”. If it is in “.in” format change it to “.com”. You can do this by backspacing “in” and typing after the URL -“.com\ncr”.
Example: To change “http:\\sulfikarkm.blogspot.in”. We should type “http:\\sulfikarkm.blogspot.com\ncr” and click enter. This process changes the “in” format to “.com”.
3) Give title to the added URL. Remember to use the H1 of our web page as the title.

Step 2

1) Go to “Post” page next.
2) Copy the URL of this page.
3) Come to content page of our blog or website. Write our name on the top right corner after the content. And link it to the post page that we copied the URL of.

Step 3

1) Go to the HTML page of our blog or web page.
2) Next to our name which we created a link to post page in Step 2, after a space type rel=”author”. And save the work. By doing this the Authorization process is completed. We successfully authorized our web page or blog.

On-Page Optimization techniques are very important for the ranking of our page higher in search results.The perfectly optimized page creates a memorable user experience and strengthens your brand. It will increase traffic, improve your search engine rankings for the most relevant keywords to your business. I have already created a blog describing the details of SEO. If you guys are interested in learning more about SEO Basics, History And Evolution. Please click the link above.

Sulfikar K M

SEO Basics History And Evolution

SEO - History And Evolution

SEO - History and Evolution is vast topic.First of all let me give you a brief idea of - What is SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a technique used to increase the visitors to a website by achieving High Ranking placement in a Search Engine results page. The higher a website is ranked in a results page of a search, the greater the chance that the site will be visited by more users. SEO optimizes websites by using different techniques.

There are two types of SEO practices.

1) White Hat SEO

White Hat SEO make use of optimization techniques and tactics that focus mainly on human audience of a search engine and completely follows rules or guidelines by Google themselves.

2) Black Hat SEO 

Black Hat SEO on the other hand focuses only on aggressive SEO strategies and tactics on a search engine rather than a human audience. And this type does not follow search engine guidelines.

Basics 

Before I start with the History of SEO, I would like to give you a basic idea about how a search engine collects all the information and gives back the required answer in the results page. For this a Google or any search engine uses 3 techniques

1) Crawling : - The Googlebot crawls web pages to analyze the details of that each page in a website.

2) Catching: - After crawling, Google bots takes a snapshot of the web page and saves it in the database.

3) Indexing: - After crawling and catching is done.When users search for a website in a search engine, Google displays appropriate answer. This display of results to the users by a search engine is called Indexing.

Other Important basics one must know about is Google Adwords and Adsense

Google Adwords: - AdWords is an advertising service offered by Google for businesses wanting to display ads on Google. The AdWords program enables businesses to set a budget for advertising and only pay when people click the ads, that is called PPC (Pay Per Click) . By using Addwords we can .

1. Attract More Customers

2. Advertise Locally or Globally              

3. Reach Right People  at Right Time

Google AdSense: - AdSense is an advertising service by Google. The program is designed for website owners who want to display videos, text or image advertisements on our website pages and earn money when site visitors view or click the ads. These advertisements are administered and maintained by Google.

History

As the internet evolved, greater need to organize and find information inspired developers to create some means to search information. In 1990 first search engine was created as a school project. They did not resemble today's modern search engines. Like the internet, search engine evolved as advances were made in technology. With search engines becoming more popular between people. More people becoming connected to the internet, for finding information with great ease. One of the main problems at this stage was the quality of information. While search engines matched the keywords that users searched for, it was really limited to just that. As a large amount of website owners did keyword stuffing and other black hat SEO practices to improve ranking and increase the possible visits to their sites.(Here keyword stuffing technique means that a web page is repeated or stuffed with a keyword in the contents of a web page).

  Evolution

If we talk about SEO Evolution. In the early 90's there were no ranking criteria. It was in the early 2000 that marked the beginning of Google takeover. Google began to provide guidelines for white hat SEO's to help webmasters rank without any problem. There were many updates throughout the years in a search engine. Some of them were as follows.

Niche specific Method 

 

At first Google was Niche specific or content specific. It gave priority to the repetition of keywords. When people began to take advantage of this technique and started to practice keyword stuffing, Google changed its method to Link Specific.

Link Specific Method

This guidelines didn’t have an actual impact on ranking so people didn't bother to follow them. This was because Link specific page ranking was based on the number of inbound links to a given page. The more link you are able to collect to your site, the higher your ranking went. But there wasn't yet any means to measure to authenticity of these links. Google outdated this update by introducing a new method called Quality link specific.  

Quality Link Specific Method

In this method Google introduced a new measure called Page Ranking. By this means we could measure the quality of inbound link.That is if we have a number of possible inbound links with higher Page Rank (High Quality Pages) our website will be ranked much higher in the results page of a search engine. When people began to misuse this method by buying and selling high quality pages to improve the ranking, Google introduced an algorithm called passing the juice.

Passing The juice: - In this algorithm, if a website sells the links to many other low quality of unethical sites, the Page Rank of that website will automatically decrease. Here a problem that came was you need to set some links in our websites. Example: If you want to link the meaning of a word to Wikipedia, the ranking will decrease. So to prevent this Google also set a new measure called rel=”nofollow”.

rel=nofollow: - This is a value to instruct Google that the link should not influence the ranking of the website. It was in the year 2009 that Google put forward a big update.

Pogo Sticking Method

In this update depending upon the user response to a site Google automatically increased or decreased the ranking of a website. In this method if users spend more time in you site the ranking of the site will automatically increase.

Bounce Rate: - Users tend to bounce from your site by closing or navigating to another site within seconds of opening your site, bounce rate of your site increases and the ranking automatically goes down.

Google Updates  

In 2011 Google assigned a search quality team to measure and maintain the quality of updates. Throughout the years Google put forward many updates to avoid the black hat users from practices which are unethical. These update helped Google to find and punish the black hat practices like spamming, keyword stuffing etc. Some of the main updates Google put forward are.

Google Panda Update

It’s an update against Content Spamming. If a website tends to do content duplication or spamming by copy pasting contents from other websites, Panda will catch and punish you for content Plagiarism. With the success of this update Google updated panda into version 4, where content spamming pages were permanently removed. Google also added panda algorithm into their main algorithm as a permanent filter.

Google Penguin Update


This update was to fight against link spamming practices. Some of the link spamming methods are.

1. Selling or Buying Links.

2. Quality Less Directory.

3. Link Exchange.

4. Website Hacking.

5. Comment Spamming.

 

Google Pigeon Update

It is an algorithm to provide users with more relevant and accurate local search results. Example: If we search for hotel from somewhere we need to get a hotel near to us as the first priority. But for our websites to be enabled in the search result after this update, we need to optimize our website with some details. They are
1. Place mark list should be given  
2. Our website should be visible in local Directories (Sulekha Yellow pages etc.).
3. Address, contact number, Pin number should be available in the about us page or contact page.
4. Geo tagging should be enabled in our website
5. Social media interactions should have local reviewers or audiences.


Humming Bird Update

It mainly focuses on deep search results. Through this update a more personal search result is received by the user. Hummingbird is an algorithm, which is made up of more than 200 factors that can affect ranking and search. Hummingbird was released very quietly in August 2013 and most site owners didn’t notice a difference. So instead of working in such a way that looks for individual words, Hummingbird works in such a way that it can better understand a question, such as “where can I find a chemist in Cochin”. It looks for the meaning behind the words, rather than just at the words themselves and it looks at the entire phrase to decipher that meaning.


Google Pirate Update

According to this update by Google we cannot copy files from a copyright protected file from another website. Pirate Update is a filter introduced in August 2012 designed to prevent sites with many copyright infringement reports, as filed through Google's DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) system, from ranking well in Google search engine.

SEO is important because it is not only about search engine. But a good SEO practices improves the user experience and usability of a website. Users trust search engines. So having a high rank in the search results page is really important. This is because the search engine users are more likely to click on one of the top 5 suggestions in the results page. So SEO is a unavoidable factor now and even more in the coming years.

Sulfikar K M