Facebook search monkey api added to yahoo permanently

It was quite a surprise for me to see the facebook search monkey application being directly added to Yahoo search.So now you don't have to login to Yahoo account and not required to have a search monkey API added to your Account.This directly shows how Yahoo is trying to bring in more ideas into a search engine , eventually bringing a distinction from its competitor Google.The best example here will be searching my name in Yahoo .

The change here is now you can add or poke or send me a message or even view my friends directly from the search engine and not login in facebook and search for a particular name.But of course you should be popular enough like me to get indexed in all search engine when searching a name LOL :).

This trend is really going to bring in more innovative developers to develop cool ideas into a search monkey applications.Though yahoo should see the advantage of making an application merged to their search engine and I feel the advantages / criteria will be

• Reach 
• Number of users using the application 
• Giving more easy shortcuts for the users 

I remember me writing about the Yahoo search Monkey project in June 2008 .

Google Images indexing

I am pretty happy to see the results of my SEO initiatives for my digital blog today.When I searched "peacock.wallpaper" in Google I can see one of my pictures from my digital photo blog added in Google's first page in the images list.



This can really fetch me more traffic to my website and indeed its giving me good traffic.
I recently added the Live feed java script code which gives me the details of the visitors LIVE.I can find that lot of my visitors are brought in from Google Images and I can see my SEO tricks are working and I thought I will share some of my thoughts on how to get indexed in Google Images .
The two most important steps in before adding images to your website /blog which eventually gets you indexed in Google Images are :

• Name of the image file
• Alternate text for the img tag (the alt attribute)

Always keep in mind to name the file with appropriate keywords .Also fill the alt attribute for all the img tags.
Also there is a method to direct Google to add your images to Google Image search. Login to your webmaster tools and go to tools/Enhanced Image Search .



Select the check box for fast indexing of your images.

Google Suggest Added to Google main search

Google made it official that they have added Google Suggest (Auto Complete ) into the main search in Google.com.



Let me put some ideas on how Google is making this possible and where is the data coming from .Google gathers information of search data from lot of their online tools and generates consolidated results like what people are searching,whats the trend , most frequently searched keywords. Some Google tools which gives these data are :

Google search (Of course)
Google toolbar
Google web history

Cuil - No Competition to Google

I knew we will have somebody soon trying to compete with the mighty Google in the web search market and here they are - CUIL - meaning Knowledge . They opened their service today with some claims “Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.” . This means they have more pages indexed in the server to look into. I think the number of pages indexes doesn’t matter but it really matters how intelligently you use an algorithm to bring out the best results out of the pages you have indexed.
Some insights on what I felt when I tried some fast tests on the new search engine. I was not at all impressed by the results I got for some typical keywords that anybody can look on the internet. I searched for ‘order food online’ , the keywords that someone search for finding take away food in their country .The first four results were fine and a bit related, but not the best ones in the market right now. I was also given some blog posts which had the keywords in their content. And that was never expected too.
Other changes that can be seen are the three column page layout when the results are shown . I really don’t think the we are unhappy with the current simple and straight layout from Google .Also I didn’t find the page to include some thing new or innovative in their idea .Google have always tried to make things simple and they were successful in fulfilling the users requirements.
I really think if any company wants to compete with Google their first and last improvement must be in Search quality. As a frequent reader of Google research blog, I am pretty sure that they are well ahead in future ideas and are going to come with something new for the semantic web or the future Web 3.0.
It didn’t look good to me when a start up come in public hinting at competing with the big players before proving their quality in search. I feel ‘Cuil’ needs to improve a lot in their search quality and need to compete with the smaller players before aiming to the top.

Google's Webinar For Webmaster Tools, Analytics & Website Optimizer Now Live

I found this video very informative for somebody who is very new to Google tools for webmasters and the tools helps a lot in faster indexing and monitoring in Google search engine .

Shockwave flash indexed in Google

With reference to my previous blog,the efforts by Google and Adobe is getting fruitful results.Nowadays I am getting a lot of SERP (Search Engine result page) which include swf ( Shockwave flash files).This is really going to help flash website owners and of course to SEO experts to understand how effectively we can share flash details with Google.I will soon write some ideas on how to do your flash files to Google index server.

SEO for Flash Websites

Its a very good news for the flash websites and the Adobe flash developers that all the major search engines (Google and Yahoo ) are ready to accept Adobe's new idea on sharing the text in flash files for the search engine crawlers to read and index it.
But I don't accept a great success on built flash websites and how much it will be success in early implementation.Most of the flash websites are designed with images and animation , text is given the last consideration .And all the search engines loves text and keep them as the first priority.
Anyways lets wait for the results and see whether how many flash pages are coming on the search pages with respect to the text on them.

Adding your blog for Google Sitemaps

Google sitemaps were introduced sometime back by the company for allowing the webmasters or the blog owners to update Google index server with their new pages or blogs .This really helps Google to find out which websites have updated their blogs or added a new page to their website.And this eventually helps the webmasters or blog owners to index their pages to the search engine servers.
If you are the webmaster of a website I would recommend you to generate an XML sitemap as per the guidelines suggested here .
And I have seen lot of blog owners finding it difficult or doesn’t know how to add their blog sitemaps to Google mainly because most of them use the free services provided by blogger or wordpress. For submitting a sitemap for a blog, we just have to submit our XML feed as Google sitemap. So copy your XML feed and submit it to Google Webmaster tools.
If you have not yet added the webmaster tools services to your account just login at this page .Once logged in, please add your website / blog to the add website section.. To start working with the webmaster tools you need to authenticate / validate to prove whether you own the website /blog you have added. There are two methods to do that after you press the validate button once you add your website / blog :
1.Add a HTML page whose name is a random alphanumeric number that Google creates.It is just a blank web page.
2.Add a meta tag (Simplest for blogs ) in your blog template code
Google will generate a meta tag with a random id value.

Do any one of the following and click the validate button. Google does the validation at that moment itself and you can start working with the tools in seconds after validation.

Once validated and listed , select the website/blog name you have added and find the various webmaster tools Google has listed .Select the SITEMAPS section and add the XML feed ( for blogs ) address and submit .For example ,
http://www.digitalnaroor.blogspot.com/atom.xml

If you want to update the sitemap for a website , you need to add the xml sitemap page in your web server and you can add the link to it .For Example , www.naroorOnline.com/sitemap.XML

What is Yahoo Search Monkey ?

I really feel that Yahoo didn’t do much marketing on the new services they started recently. The developer platform for this service is called Yahoo Search Monkey.
And the main reasons Yahoo came up with this service are

1. To improve their Search services
2. To have yahoo users to login account to yahoo all time when they look for any yahoo services. I think people started doing that for Google… anyways I do it all time :) .
3. To have the search results have different look and bring some change in the usual search results.

So let me explain how it works .Yahoo has called all the general developer community to use their Search monkey API’s to develop applications that can be added to Yahoo search gallery. Right now they have added some 48 applications. To make it more clear let me take an example , somebody has made an application with LinkedIn , the pretty famous professional social networking website. So here check my search list when I search for ‘Naroor’.



To try it in you PC follow the following instructions as follows.

1. Go to yahoo.com .Sign in to your account there and return back to you main yahoo homepage with login session.
2. Search for a name, say ‘Naroor’. In the search page you can see the linkedIn listing but not the picture. Now you can see a Customize combo near the search button on the top. Click the dropdown and select browse gallery. The gallery lists various search monkey application that developers had developed and Yahoo added them to the list. Now select LinkedIN from that list and add it .
3. Now when you search for the name you can see my picture with the link .(I think it takes some time for the application to be added to your account but I have no idea how much time ,max by one day.)

So to summarize, Yahoo search monkey can be said as a place to redesign the yahoo search result and make it more attractive that you are sure it will make the surfer to click the link. Check out some other Search monkey applications like Movies, recipes , restaurant reviews.

Basic SEO for Blogs and Websites

I have seen so many of friends asking how they can make their blog address or website to be listed in Google search engine when I say I work on SEO. I try to give some of the ideas but thought I should write down a list of basic steps any internet publisher can do .So follow the basic steps and see the results.

1.Searchable Keywords
You should list the keywords / phrases that your prospective visitor will be searching to find your blog/website .For example, say you write about recipes, and you want the page which has the recipe for ‘ chicken curry ‘ , list the various keyword combination which people can search like Indian chicken curry , Preparing chicken curry , ingredients of chicken curry etc .Once you have the list ready try to have those keywords mentioned in the webpage anywhere .

2.Title and Description HTML tags
The first impression about a webpage comes from the title and the description tags. The Title tags is the sentences which is shown when the page is list in Google search results and that of course tells the internet user whether to visit the web page or not .And I recommend you to have the top keyword added on the Title tag .Also keep the length of title tag sentence less than 80-90 character count.
The Meta Description tag is used in showing the snippet in the Google result. The small description after the title is the Snippet. But from my experience the company doesn’t show the description tag always but when it finds a good combination of the keywords mentioned in that short description about the page. At times it tries to find some description in the body or common directory like DMOZ.org.

3.Google Webmaster Central
Google has opened a service mostly for the webmasters or blog owners to add their website information’s through this account. If you have a Google account you can log into through Google Webmaster Login page.
Once you login there are so many tools for optimizing for Google search engine. Most attractive and important tool is submitting the Google Sitemaps , which I will be covering in detail in my next blog on that topic .Will be adding some more details on the tools provided in Google webmaster central .

4.Keep blogging or updating with interesting topics
As a blogger you really has to convince the world that your blog is worth a look or subscription and the only method is to write and update with interesting blogs or articles which interests public. Once the general public start looking for more blog entries you can find high page rank website linking to your blog or website.
Google Searching ranking mostly works on the basis of how famous you are on the internet ie how many websites or blogs are pointing to your website or blog.

5.Wrong information about Google page ranking
I have heard so many people thinking that if you participate in Google Adwords (their advertisement service), it helps you to gain or increase Google Rank. That’s wrong information. The search engine is not mixing their revenue generation method and their main search facility together.

Hello SEO World

May be this is my "hello World " program for SEO.Yes, I have decided to shift some of my time into Search Engine Optimisation , which was a hobby to me when I started blogging.Now as I have taken up a job which is 75 percent SEO and rest programming.I can assure I will be sharing lot of my findings and latest stuffs happening in the SEO world.Happy reading.