Posts Tagged ‘SEO’
New Domain name: Dot Tel
DotTel ( .TEL ) is a new type of domain name that promises a new way of locating information on the web. It may also include benefits to compliment your existing SEO Strategy.
Search news contacted the Dot Tel registry recently for some information about the new TLD, to see what all the hype was about, and the benefits it has to offer for a company’s Search Engine Optimisation Strategy.
DotTel is a different concept from most other ordinary domains such as .COM or .COM.AU, because rather than using the domain for ‘regular purposes’ such as hosting a traditional web-page that presents your company or product information using a HTTP web server, Dot Tel is a ‘directory service‘ of sorts, which presents a company or person’s contact information, and that content is serverd over the ‘DNS’ or Domain Name Service protocol.
DNS is s the underlying technology that runs the domain name system, in essence, allowing you to type a web address into your web browser, and it locates where on the web you need to go to retrieve that information or website.
A spokesperson for .TEL said the new domain has very specific and unique content, which allows customers to locate your business and provide information on the products or service you provide, in addition to your contact information and location. You are also allowed to to specify keywords related to your business, so this has the added benefit of being crawled and indexed by local search engines.
Making use of DNS technology presents many incentives for search engines such as Google to crawl and index the information because it is in a standard and easy to read format, and updates to content are almost instant, search engines have more incentive to re-index .TEL content in short intervals.
Finally, the spokeperson feels .TEL adds a great deal of value to the end customer because .TEL content is easy to maintain, can be updated at short intervals and has the best return on investment in the SEO business because it is expected to retail at very low prices (approx $15-20 USD/year).
When asked about privacy concerns, DotTel has advised that just like many social networking sites such as Facebook, customers can decide on what information is made public and who gets to sees information that they would prefer not to be seen by the public. In a similar way that you can see the friends of your contacts in Facebook, DotTel will also allow you to see a limited amount of information to people in your approved contacts network.
The Dot Tel landrush is currently on (Jan 09 to February) and landrush applications start on Feb 3rd at a premium price, and general availability (GoLive) begins on 24th March.
Visit the Telnic website for more information on this new and exciting Domain TLD, and view their demos for demonstrations of the many features and benefits offered by DotTel.
We’d like to thank DotTel for supplying this information.
Article brought to you by Search King.
StumbleUpon
Recently, we were reviewing the website usage logs of a newly registered website, and had found that within 4 days, there had been an amazing 700 unique visitors and over 2000 hits to the site.
This is a phenomenal number of hits for such a new website with little to no exposure, and so we began to investigate just where this traffic was coming from.
Our analysis found that most of the traffic was being referred from a website called StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a community-driven website that rates other webpages.
The concept is that you can use stumbleupon to find random internet pages and rate them. It compares your past ratings to that of “like minded people” who have similar usage trends to yourself to present you a page that you are likely to be interested in.
It also allows you to add and rate random pages which you quite literally stumble upon into the “stumbleupon” directory to be presented to “other like minded users”.
This has a few advantages over search results presented by SERPS, as each site is quality-rated by real humans, rather than being presented with a search result displayed by a search engine whose results may be manipulated.
This is an interesting website, and it demonstrates the power of social networking and other community driven websites that are capable of generating traffic, and also highlights that boosting traffic through search engine advertising and search engine optimisation needn’t be your exclusive focus for your online marketing strategy.
Check out stumbleupon.com or add the toolbar to your browser (support for firefox and internet explorer).
Google Chrome
Introducing Google Chrome
A new web browser from Google
Google, the world’s most popular search engine has this week launched a new web browser.
It is called Google Chrome, and it aims to take a slice of the browser market away from Microsoft in the same way that Mozilla has done in recent years with it’s free and open source browser Firefox.
Google Chrome features most of the features you’d expect to see in a web browser, such as tabbed browsing, bookmarks and other mandatory gadgets, but at it’s core, Google Chrome has one thing the others don’t:
“One Box for Everything”
This is what Google Chrome is centered on, and it is basically a URL/Address bar and search box all in one.
Google Chrome
In the past, some of us web-savvy folk have scoffed at less experienced users who type a URL or web address into a search engine’s search box, or entering key words in a search box, yet it seems Google has discovered that the majority of it’s users aren’t
Google Chromes “one box for everything” feature predicts the words you’re typing, and immediately starts presenting URLs of actual websites that you’ve visited in the past, or search results related to your keywords that are indexed in Google, and even presents related pages to those you’re searching for. This new feature alone has the potential to change how users interact with web browsers and search engines.
Google Chrome comes at an interesting time when the Search Giant has threats from new competing search engines such as CUIL, who are offering a different search experience with supposedly more results, as well as Microsoft’s recent update to Internet Explorer which has a new privacy feature dubbed “porn mode”.
Google Chrome’s response to the new Microsoft feature is “incognito mode” which stores cookies and session data in a temporary cache and removes all traces of form data, cookies and pages visited when you’re done using it.
At a time when Microsoft had finally received some new attention and perhaps respect for the feature, Google has stolen it’s spotlight and positioned their browser at a perfect time when many people are ready to download browser updates.
Google certainly seems one of the most capable companies in the world to adapt to change and react to it’s competitors whilst leading the way in innovation, which goes a long way to demonstrating their abilities as a software company.
Changes, Questions, Uncertainty
When they already rule the world in web search, video streaming (youtube), and many other mediums, it begs the question, “when does google stop”?
There has been speculation in recent times that Google was preparing it’s own operating system based on Google, and perhaps google chrome is one step closer to that dream, however given that an operating system is less important in this web 2.0 world where feature rich applications are run on a web via a browser regardless of your platfrom, and the rising interest in SaaS (software as a service), Google is positioning itself to gain yet more of it’s competitors ground.
SearchKing has been often critical of browser plugins such as Adobe Flash being used to stream video on youtube as a hack. Google’s ability to obtain a large portion of the browser market could see the search engine/browser change the trends and introduce new browser plugins in favour of it’s massive content networks eliminating licensing fees and changing the way we interact wiht the web.
This is certainly a very interesting time for the internet and for Google.
What does this mean for Google? It means that it can promote Google Chrome as a superior browser using it’s target audience on it’s search engine. It also means they can use the browser to present results it favours from it’s own networks such as Youtube and Google maps. It certainly creates a much more feature rich experience for the user, but poses certain speculative questions about privacy and other concerns over google approaching a monopoly. The browser certainly will certainly further contribute in bolstering it’s own search network and securing it’s advertising space.
What does the introduction of Google Chrome mean for the for the future of firefox? It will probably die off or emulate many of the features in Google Chrome, or be amalgamated and swallowed up by google.
What does this mean for Microsoft? They need to get creative and innovative, they need to set new trends and benchmarks and stay a few steps ahead of the competition. They will probably set their lawyers out to find ways to pick at the new browser.
What does this mean for SEO? It means that google’s browser has the potential to change the way people search for information and how it is presented, and therefore SEO Specialist had best invest a lot of time researching the new browser and changes in the search engine if they’re able to deliver relevant results to their target audience.
Checkout Google Chrome Beta for Windows today: http://www.google.com/chrome/
Like all things Google, it first comes out in Beta mode, and the new software is available to download now for Windows (sorry mac and linux users).
This article is brought to you by Search King.
Splash Pages, Why they’re bad for Search
Remember the early days of internet usage? I’m not talking back in the 70s or 80s when internet used to be very basic HTML websites and text-based bulletin boards, I’m thinking more along the lines of the late 90s and early 21st century when the internet was becoming mass-market, and people first started experiencing the web and it’s potential.
The early days of web publishing saw an abundance of terrible looking websites churned out by Frontpage and worse, MS Publisher. The thought of a yellow-text website on blue background makes me want to cringe.
Fortunately for many of us, new content management systems and web design packages are standards compliant and pre-loaded with many visually appealing sites that can be built and published by even the most inexperienced internet user.
But despite all of the great lengths we’ve gone since the days of ugly websites, I’m still seeing a lot of websites that present “spash” pages, or intro pages to visitors upon first visit to their website.
I too have been guilty of using splash pages, and despite being a little outdated and unprofessional (if not done properly), splash pages can be bad for search marketing.
For starters, splash pages are generally presented in GIF, JPEG or Flash multimedia images, and search engines for the most part index text, which is where most of your search marketing efforts lie.
Due to the lack of text, a search engine is generally unable to determine the page relevance to search terms and categorised data on your website, so therefore the spash page is likely to have a much poorer page rank (or none at all) when compared to other pages on your site that are loaded with relevant information and key words.
You ideally want your homepage/start page to be the first thing that a visitor sees when they land on your page, and you want this information to rank well.
Internet users are very savvy, they use tabbed browsing and skim through information on many pages to quickly find the data they need.
If you’re presenting a splash page to a person who has clicked through a search engine, they need to wait or make an additional click to get through to the information, and you can’t afford to be adding these hurdles to your visitors, especially when you’ve paid for them to click on your advertised link in the search engines.
Additionally, pagerank is usually much lower due to the lack of information on the splash page when compared to other pages on your site that actually do contain relevant information and keywords, this is where you want to attain higher page rank and have your visitors land when they click on your link or paid advertisement.
Tip: remove your landing page and present your visitors with relevant information as soon as possible and you’re likely to attract their attention long enough that they stay on the page and find what they’re looking for, or in many cases, find the product or service they’ve been searching for, which will hopefully convert to a sale.
Be on the lookout later this week for more news from search king related to landing pages, part of a good search advertising campaign.