Seo Traffic Spider asked:


The process of search engine optimization involves tweaking various aspects of your website and deals only with the organic search results. It has nothing to do with paid search also known as inorganic search or PPC. In order to improve your positioning in the organic search results, these guidelines will point out the tactics on how you can improve the visibility of your website.

Page Title:

Page title also referred to as the ‘title tag’ needs to be unique for each page of your website. This tag tells search engines and also the visitors what that particular webpage is all about. The title tag of each page should contain the business/website name followed with important information that relates to the webpage. One must avoid the following:

Recording a title tag that is not relevant to the information present on the webpage. Recording the same title tag across all the pages of the website. Recording long title tags.

Meta Description:

The Meta description tag gives both the search engines and also the visitors who perform a search on the search engine an idea on what the web page is all about. That’s why it’s important to precisely summarize the content of your webpage. It’s always safe to keep the meta description tag within 160 characters (including spaces), as the rest of it gets truncated. One must avoid the following:

Writing a meta description that is not relevant to the information presented on the webpage. Recording the same meta description across all the web pages of the website. Recording the meta description with only keywords.

URL Structure:

It’s important to create a URL structure that is friendly to the search engines as this will help in better indexing of your website. For this reason, it is essential to create appropriate filenames and expressive categories on your website. One must avoid the following:

Recording long URLs Recording the same URL across all the web pages. Recording deep nested subdirectories Recording irrelevant directory names.

Website Navigation:

A website that is easy to navigate can help the visitors to find the information they are looking for. It also helps the search engines in indexing the pages appropriately. It is important to ensure that all the web pages of your website are interlinked properly and also show the correct page when clicked on. The use of sitemaps both HTML and XML help the spiders to crawl the website easily and also index it. One must avoid the following:

Creating complex websites that are difficult to navigate. Creating drop-down menus. Developing a HTML sitemap in which the pages are not organized. Indexing the 404 page in the search engine.

Unique Content:

The content that is hosted on your webpage needs to be informative, such that it can elicit action. Ensure that the content is not copied and is 100% your own creativity. Keep the content focused around your primary keywords and ensure that the keyword density is around 2.75% to 3.21%. It is also good to keep changing the content on your website so that the visitors can see that the site is not static but dynamic with its content. One must avoid the following:

Using images that serve as textual content. Using long sentences. Incorrect grammar and spelling mistakes. Duplicate content on the web pages of your website. Stuffing keywords unnecessarily.

Anchor Text:

Anchor texts are links that direct visitors to the internal pages of the website or to an external page/website. Anchor text helps the users to easily navigate between pages and also helps the spiders to understand what the page is all about, that it is linked to. One must avoid the following:

Using general anchor texts. Using anchor text that is not related to the content of the webpage or is off topic. Using long sentences. Creating unnecessary links.

Heading Tags:

Heading tags are used to represent the heading of the content of the webpage. Heading tags range in 6 sizes – h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6. These tags should only be used at the appropriate places. One must avoid the following:

Using one heading tag for the entire content of the webpage. Using too many heading tags throughout the content of the webpage.

Alt Tag Optimization:

Images can’t be read by a spider when they crawl on the website. Therefore, it is important to use alt tags for the images. It is best suggested to use the primary keyword as the alt tag following the contents that describe the page. One must avoid the following:

Using long filenames. Stuffing excess of keywords in the alt tags.

Robots.txt File:

A robots.txt file is used to prohibit the robots to crawl a particular page based on the nature and content of information that is available. This file must be placed in the root directory of your site and also named as robots.txt. One must avoid the following:

Search result pages to be crawled.

Website Promotion:

You can promote your website using offline promotion, online promotion, social media sites, AdWords optimization, Google’s Local Business Center, forming groups, forums etc.

Once you have implemented or taken note of all these tactics, do use the Google Webmaster Tools that will help you in solving many of the issues that are related to your website. You can also monitor the performance of your website by using Google Analytics.



Lonnie

Stephen Furnari asked:


I was recently a presenter at a conference on raising investment capital for early stage and emerging companies. One of my co-presenters, John Ason, is an angel investor and the other presenter, Jonas Wang, Ph.D., is a partner in Sycamore Ventures, a venture capital fund.

In their presentations, both John and Jonas described their funding criteria, which was fairly textbook for an angel investor and venture capitalist. John invests in early-stage, pre-revenue companies where his technical and business background can provide some value-add to management, and Jonas invests in later stage opportunities, for example a B, C or D round financing.

What I found unusual about John’s and Jonas’ funding criteria was that they both require an investment candidate to have intellectual property that is patented (or patentable) as a condition to funding. That is, if a company seeking capital does not have patentable IP, neither John, nor Jonas, will consider the company as an investment candidate.

Quite often, early stage investors prefer investing in companies with exciting intellectual property, or the existence of unique intellectual property forms an important part of an investor’s overall investment decision. However, this was the first time I had heard investors say definitively that they wouldn’t even consider funding a company if it did not have patentable intellectual property.

This made a bit more sense to me with respect to Jonas, whose venture capital fund invests in only med-tech, biotech and pharmaceutical deals–companies whose success and failure rides on their scientific inventions and ingenuity. But the criteria made less sense to me with respect to John, who proclaims to be industry agnostic and has invested in deals that range from toys to new media and software.

According to Amy Goldsmith, a patent attorney with Gottlieb, Rackman and Reisman, P.C., investors prefer companies with patented (or patentable) technology for two reasons. First, in order to obtain a patent from the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), the governing body that issues patents in the United States, the company has to prove that its idea or invention is useful, new and that the technology is not obvious from what has been done before. In essence, the invention is prescreened by the USPTO to have good chance of being economically viable and that it is something that hasn’t been seen in the marketplace before. Good news for investors.

The second reason investors prefer companies with patentable technology is that once a patent is issued, the company has the exclusive right to use that technology for a period of 20 years. That is, management can prevent any other person or entity from exploiting their technology for commercial gain, reducing or eliminating competition.

For an investor like Anson, who expects that only one in 10 of the companies he funds will ever produce a return on his investment, patentable technology is one of the principal ways he increases his odds for a successful exit. “Most of the companies I fund are two people in a kitchen or garage” claims Anson. The companies Anson invests in need every competitive advantage they can get to survive. A “keystone” or “fundamental” patent, business terms for very strong patented technology, keeps competitors out of the market.

As opposed to a company with an “execution” business model, where the company’s success hinges on management’s ability to execute their business strategy faster, bigger and cleaner than their competitors (and where, however, a competitor can easily jump into the market to compete), a company with a business model built around one or more pieces of patentable technology can stop everyone in its tracks that tries to duplicate its products or services.

Says Anson, “unlike an execution company, if a company with a business built around a keystone patent makes mistakes or even fails in the execution of its business plan, it can still survive.”

Interestingly enough, Amy Goldsmith notes that she rarely, if ever, sees funded early-stage companies that have patents at the time of funding. The patent office is so delayed with respect to its evaluation of patent applications (according to Goldsmith, it can take three to four years for a patent to be issued), that companies are frequently past the early stages of their development by the time a patent is issued.

In lieu of having an actual patent issued or a patent application pending, Goldsmith suggests that VCs and angel investors may require funding candidates to retain a patent attorney to perform a “patentability search” prior to, or as part of, the investor’s due diligence investigation. During a patentability search, the attorney researches the USPTO’s database of issued and pending patents to see if someone else has previously applied for or received a patent for the technology in question. The result of the patentability search will determine whether a company has a good chance of obtaining a patent or if they need to scrap the idea and move on. Investors will rely on the results of this search when determining whether or not to participate in a deal.

John Anson is a bit more forgiving when it comes to requiring patentability searches or pending patents when he assesses a candidate for funding. Patent applications can be costly to prepare and often start-ups do not have the cash to pay for searches and applications. In this case, John relies on his extensive technological background to make his own determination as to whether the company’s technology has a reasonable chance of obtaining a patent. He researches the USPTOs database much in the same way that a patent attorney would. This information is available to the public for free at the USPTO’s website (www.USPTO.gov).

According to Dr. Wang in his presentation at the conference, the type of patent you obtain is also an important factor when investors assess whether they will make an investment in your company. The USPTO issues several kinds of patents, including design patents that protect the ornamental design of a functional item such as jewelry, furniture, beverage containers and computer icons; utility patents that protect the functionality of a given item; software patents; and biological patents.

However, according to Dr. Wang, investors have a certain amount of disdain for business method patents, which are a class of patents that disclose and claim new methods or processes for doing business.

Amy Goldsmith concurred with Dr. Wang’s assessment. It seems that the USPTO previously issued a significant number of business method patents and, as a result, patent owners had difficulty enforcing their rights under the patents. Further, according to Anson, because the description of the technology or method underlying the patent becomes public information within 18 months from filing, competitors can study a company’s business process and fairly easily design another process to go around the patented method. This actually puts the patent holder at a disadvantage as compared to never obtaining the business method patent at all.

The public’s easy access to your technology when you file and obtain a patent strikes a nerve with some entrepreneurs. I spoke with an entrepreneur recently who was holding off on filing any patent applications until he achieved some commercial momentum with his invention. He feared that once the details of his invention became public that a company in some far reaching province in Asia may try to steal his technology. Instead, he was going to rely on keeping his invention a trade secret for the time being.

Says Goldsmith, “depending on how easy your invention is to duplicate, there definitely is some truth that if your invention takes off, certain companies will copy it.” If you haven’t filed in Asia for a patent protection to prevent your invention from being copied, you will have little recourse.

According to Amy, the problem of enforcing patents in Asia is improving, but still isn’t great. “It will be another five to 10 years before we see a legal system that’s capable of enforcing patents, but it is getting better.”

My conversation with Amy Goldsmith was enlightening, and I learned a number of new things that would be important considerations for companies who want to protect their IP. These include:

? Budget. Make sure you have a budget in place to pay for searches and patent applications, which can start at $10,000.

? Timing. You only have one year from the use of an invention in commerce to file for your patent. If you’re thinking of filing, give yourself enough time to do searches and prepare the application.

? Scrutiny. According to Goldsmith, nearly 99% of patent applications will initially be rejected by the USPTO. The applicant (or his or her attorney or agent) must then appeal to the USPTO in order to demonstrate why the invention is patentable. This second step to the patent application process can be costly and is an expense that will be in addition to the $10,000 fee for services related to the application process.

? Expertise. Given the high percentage of patent applications that get bounced by the USPTO after the initial filing and the fact that you cannot make changes to an application (except to fix grammatical errors), even if you have a technical background, it’s in your best interest to retain patent counsel to prepare your patent application.

? Ownership. Patent applications can only be filed in the name of a person who invented the patent, not a company’s name. Therefore, if your employee has created an invention for your company, then you need to have invention assignment language in an employment contract or have at will employees (those without an employment contract) sign an assignment of inventions agreement.

? Monitoring. Because the US system for protecting patents is one of exclusion-no one else has the right to use the technology–it is the patent owner’s responsibility to make sure that others are not infringing on issued patent rights. It is prudent to put a system for monitoring your patented inventions in place and have a budget for enforcing your rights.

Interested in starting or funding a company that has a business model built around a piece of patented technology?

Got concerns about protecting your intellectual property?

Consider attending the seminar we are sponsoring on May 9, 2008, called “Patents & Trade Secrets: How to Protect Your Company’s IP”.

Amy Goldsmith will be our featured speaker. Details are included in this month’s newsletter.



Andre

Gerald Faustia asked:


Selecting a web host for a smaller business verses a larger business can be different in several ways, because often time a smaller businesses website is smaller and less complex then a website a larger business might have. Also, while a larger business can afford to “shoot the works” and can easily afford to pay for extra features and services that they may not even use, a smaller business owner will tend to like to keep a closer watch on the expenditures with regards to their web hosting services.

Just heading out blindly on the net looking for a web hosting service can be difficult, because there are so many of them and they all offer a wide variety of features and services as well as prices. It is for this reason that you need to study up a bit on web hosting services and come to a determination as to what you do and don’t need in your web hosting service features and functions.

There are many basic plans that are in the $5 price range that you may qualify for if you are a small business owner but they have absolute minimum services and features. If you have a business website that has less than one-hundred pages and you don’t plan on doing any Internet marketing then you may want to consider one of these easy to find “entry level” plans.

One of these entry level,plans would work great if your website is not going to have any streaming videos in it and is a basic and simple website. You might also want to consider what is referred to as shared hosting and these plans are in the $10 price range. Feature advantages of a shared hosting is that they have broader bandwidth and storage capacity compared to a standard plan.

If you are going to be using your website for Internet marketing then you will definitely want to give some thought to your strategy for SEO or search engine optimization. Far too many new Internet business people think that the products or service that they are going to market on the net are so in demand that they won’t have to do much in the way of promoting, because they will “catch fire” and take off on their own.

This is almost virtually without exception a mistake and you will have to do some promoting of your website with SEO like it or not. You will have no problem locating a web hosting service that offers SEO services but it will cost you money. The other option is to do the SEO yourself in which case you will need certain tools made available by your web hosting service.

One thing that you will want to know is whether or not your hosting service currently creates site maps and if they automatically ping Yahoo, Google and Ask after you have upgraded or added a page to your website. There are a few other tools that you will need to have to do your own SEO but the best way to find out about them is to take the time to research SEO tools on the net and learn about them.



Teresa

Nevil Darukhanawala asked:


We know that video content has far better prominence in search engine listings, and a couple of good quality videos (with innovative content), if promoted well, can generate traffic and affect your websites ranking for your keywords.

The main reason for this is the wide popularity of video sites like YouTube, Meta Café and the likes, and search engines showing preference to video content rather than textual content. And yet, there are some important points to consider before you can go ahead and optimize your videos for search engines and promote them.

Since universal search started favoring video content, many SEO experts started using videos as a strategy to get quicker rankings for keywords (some even with strong competition) that otherwise would have taken months to achieve, not to mention the hard work involved in optimizing the site, and building links. Now this is not an alternative to building your regular content and links, but rather an additional boost to the existing seo efforts.

A simple method SEO’s use is to publish the video on their client’s websites and then upload it to sites like YouTube. When a search engine would find the same Meta tags in YouTube, as that of a video hosted on the client’s site, it would pass on some link juice immediately, impressing the client to no end to see his video ranked top for his keyword.

But keep in mind, video content is treated like any other content as far as search engines go, and things like having your keyword in the Meta tags, Title and the Synopsis is equally important. Since the search engines cannot understand the content of the person speaking in the video, they look into the title, the Meta tags, and synopsis of your video to take clues as to what the video is about. One good idea is to create a text transcript of the conversation of the video on that page as well.

The title of the video needs to be given a lot of prominence! Other than ensuring that your keyword/ keyword phrase is included in the title, you have to create a title that is captivating enough so that users come watch it (and recommend it).

Now that you have your videos optimized, the next big question is “where to host your videos”? Well that would depend on what do you want to achieve. If you are looking at increasing the traffic to your website, then it’s better to host the video on your website first before submitting to the big video sites. But if your objective is to spread brand awareness and want to create a viral, then you can safely host it on sites like YouTube.

Once the optimized video is live, then the next step is to build some links to your video content. You must think the video content you have created is very useful to the users, so why not announce this across social bookmarking sites, and even sites like Twitter. The more users like your video, the more traffic will reach your website.

One word of caution; you could find yourself in a situation where you are battling with your own content. What this means is that if you host a video on your site, and then submit the same video on sites like YouTube with the same title, and Meta tags, you could find yourself competing with YouTube for your keyword. Since YouTube has much more credibility than your site, it could happen that your content gets lost somewhere in search listings. To avoid this you can upload the video with the title and Meta tags around your primary keyword on your site, and then tweak the title and Meta tags of the video around another secondary keyword you want to target before you submit to sites like YouTube.

A lot of automatic video submission software’s are becoming popular, and sites like Tube Mughal can submit your video to hundreds of video sites instantaneously. This can be very useful in some campaigns where a viral effect is what your desire. The main problem with automatic submissions is that you cannot control the title, and Meta tags of your submissions, and if you are looking at using video as a tool to boost and increase search rankings, then a more careful strategy needs to be adopted.

SEO Expert Mumbai - Well I hope you have enjoyed this article on optimizing your video content.



Edwin

Shawn Burgy asked:


Web Hosting Martinsburg WV :

Here are some possibilities you may want to consider when selecting a discounted Web hosting company.

There are three types of hosting plans available:



Shared hosting



Virtual Private Server hosting



Dedicated Server hosting.

What Is A Web Host?

Essentially a web host is somebody who provides a place to store the files (pages) of your web site and makes them visible to the internet at large.

People can view these pages using a web browser, read the content, download files and generally interact in all the ways you have probably done on the internet up until now.

When you purchase a web hosting account you are literally buying disk space on the hosting company’s computer in which you store your web site.

Your site will consist of pages containing text, images or graphics that you use on those pages and any files that you might make available for download such as videos or ebooks.

You control which pages are visible and what content is on them by creating these pages in an HTML editor. This is special software that creates web pages and is, to all intents and purposes, nothing more than a word processor with extra functionality built in.

With a shared hosting plans, several web sites are hosted on the same server, sharing the server’s resources and using the same IP address. Virtual Private Server (VPS) plans consist of a server that is split into multiple virtual servers, each virtual server has it’s own IP address, some companies call these types of plans Virtual Dedicated Servers. Dedicated servers are the most expensive type of plan, each dedicated server customer gets their own physical server, nice to have, but prohibitively expensive for personal web sites and small operations.

Features Of Web Hosting For The Beginners

If you are just starting on the Internet and wish to have a good website to display your skills as a writer, or as a marketer, then you can use the web hosting for beginners. The features of web hosting for the beginners are essentially very basic so that any newcomer can easily get accustomed to these basic features quickly. As the time passes, and the newcomer becomes skilled in using these features, he can then use the intermediate and the advanced features and create a better website. This article gives you an idea of how to use these basic features provided by your web hosting service for novices.

However, before you know more about the web hosting and the web development in detail, you need to know some very important features of the internet like the World Wide Web. World Wide Web is a network of huge number of computers that are around the world that are connected to each other for communications purpose with the help of protocols like HTTP. HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is a language that allows transmission of the documents present on the Internet.

Why Web Hosting Is Important?

The web hosting server allows you to host your website and make it available on the Internet for the whole world to access it. This way you can advertise your service and products on your website. Some of the other essential web services like the e-mail capability, database capability, and uploading dynamic content are essential to really tap the power of websites.

The e-mail capability allows you to receive and dispatch e-mails and information to be sent to your subscribers directly from your website. The database capability allows you to store a large amount of useful information on your website. The dynamic content is the content that allows you and your visitors to interact with each other.

VPS hosting plans tend to be somewhat more expensive than shared hosting plans, but it is our belief that they are worth the extra cost since they provide much more control and flexibility. If you are a Java developer, chances are you are used to “getting your hands dirty”, and working on a server using good old Unix commands. Shared hosting plans tend to have “user friendly” (dumbed down?) interfaces, which might simplify administration, but can also severely limit what you are able to do, for example, let’s say a shared hosting company gives you 300 megabytes of disk space to host your web site, and an additional 300 megabytes for your email, if your web site takes 5 megabytes of space, but your email server is getting full, there is no way to allocate more space to store emails and reduce the allocation of web space. In addition to leaving you unable to reallocate resources as needed, you can also forget about installing any applications on your server. Another disadvantage of shared hosting plans is that an IP address is shared among several customers, which could have potential problems. For example, if one of the customers uses their mail server for bulk emailing, the IP address of that mail server may be banned from several systems, in a shared hosting plan environment, this would affect all the customers using the same server.

With few exceptions, shared hosting plans that support Java do so through a shared JVM, which means that you have no way of starting or stopping the JVM, and the same JVM is used to run the Java applications of all the hosting company’s clients on the server. With a VPS plan, since you have access to your own (virtual) server, it is a given that you get full control over the JVM.

For all of these reasons I recommend the Web Hosting Providers in my links.

Price, Value, And most of all Customer Service.

Web Hosting Martinsburg WV



Lewis

Oleg Ishenko asked:


High placement in a search engine is critical for the success of any online business. Pages appearing higher in the search engine results to queries relevant to a site’s business will get higher targeted traffic. To get this kind of competitive advantage Internet companies employ various SEO techniques in order to optimize certain factors used by search engines to rank results.

In the best case SEO specialists create relevant well-structured keyword rich pages, which not only please the eyes of a search engine crawler but also have value to the human visitor. Unfortunately it takes months for this strategic approach to produce feasible results, and many search engine optimizers use so-called “black-hat” SEO.

‘Black Hat’ SEO and Search Engine Spam

The oldest and simplest “black SEO” strategy is adding a variety of popular keywords into web pages to make them rank high for popular queries. This behavior is easily detected since generally such pages include unrelated keywords that lack topical focus. With the introduction of the term vector analysis search engine became immune to this sort of manipulation. However “black-hat’ SEO went one step further creating the so-called “doorway’ pages - tightly focused pages consisting of a bunch of keywords relevant to a single topic. In terms of keyword density such pages are able to rank high in search results but never seen by human visitors as they are redirected to the page intended to receive the traffic.

Another trend is the abusing the link popularity based ranking algorithms, such as PageRank with the help of dynamically-generated pages. Such pages receive the minimum guaranteed PageRank and the small endorsements from thousands of these pages are able to produce a sizeable PageRank for the target page. Search engines constantly improve their algorithms trying to minimize the effect of “black-hat”‘ SEO techniques, but SEOs also persistently respond with new more sophisticated and technically advanced tricks so that this process bears a resemblance to an arms race.

“Black-hat” SEO is responsible for the immense amount of search engine spam-pages and links created solely to mislead search engines and boost rankings for client web sites. To weed out the web spam search engines can use statistical methods that allow computing distributions for a variety of page properties. The outlier values in these distributions can be associated with web spam. The ability to identify web spam is extremely valuable to search engine not just because it allows excluding spam pages from their indices but also using them to train more sophisticated machine learning algorithms capable to battle web spam with higher precision.

Using Statistics to Detect Search Engine Spam

An example of an application of statistical methods to detect web spam is presented in the paper “Spam, Damn Spam and Statistics” by Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse and Marc Najork from Microsoft. They used two sets of pages downloaded from the Internet. The first set was crawled repeatedly from November 2002 to February 2003 and consisted from 150 million URLs. For each page the researches recorded HTTP status, time of download, document length, number of non-markup words, and a vector indicating the changes in page content between downloads. A sample of this set (751 pages) was inspected manually and 61 spam pages were discovered, or 8.1% of the set with a confidence interval of 1.95% at 95% confidence.

Another set was crawled between July and September 2002 and comprises 429 million pages and 38 million HTTP redirects. For this set the following properties were recorded: URL, URLs of outgoing links; for the HTTP redirects - the source and the target URL. 535 pages were manually inspected and 37 of them were identified as spam (6.9%).

The research concentrates on studying the following properties of web pages: - URL properties, including length and percentage of non-alphabetical characters (dashes, digits, dots etc.). - Host name resolutions. - Linkage properties. - Content properties. - Content evolution properties. - Clustering properties.

URL Properties

Search engine optimizers often use numerous automatically generated pages to massively distribute their low PageRank to a single target page. Since the pages are machine generated we can expect their URLs to look differently from those created by humans. The assumptions are that these URLs are longer and include more non-alphabetical characters such as dashes, slashes or digits. When searching for spam pages we should consider the host component only, not the entire URL down to the page name.

The manual inspection of the 100 longest hostnames had revealed that 80 of them belong to adult site and 11 refer to the financial and credit related sites. Therefore in order to produce a spam identification rule the length property has to be combined with the percentage of non-alphabetical characters. In the given set 0.173% of URLs are at least 45 characters long and contain at least 6 dots, 5 dashes or 10 digits-and the vast majority of these pages appear to be spam. By changing the threshold values we can change the number of pages flagged as spam and the number of false positives.

Host Name Resolutions

One can notice that Google, given a query q, tends to rank a page higher if the host component of the page’s URL contains keywords from q. To utilize this search engine optimizers stuff pages with URLs containing popular keywords and keyphrases and set up DNS servers to resolve these URLs to a single IP. Generally SEOs generate a large number of host names to rank for a wide variety of popular queries.

This behavior can also be relatively easy detected by observing the number of host name resolutions to a single IP. In our set 1,864,807 IP addresses are mapped to only one host name, and 599,632 IPs-to 2 host names. There are also some extreme cases with hundreds of thousands host names mapped to a single IP, and the record-breaking IP referred by 8,967,154 host names.

To flag pages as spam a threshold of 10,000 name resolutions was chosen. About 3.46% of the pages in the Set 2 are served from IP addresses referred by 10,000 and more host names and the manual inspection of this sample proved that with very few exceptions they were spam. Lower threshold (1,000 name resolutions or 7.08% pages in the set) produces an unacceptable amount of false positives.

Linkage Properties

The Web consisting of interlinked pages has a structure of a graph. Therefore in graph terminology the number of outgoing links of a page can be referred to as the out-degree, while the in-degree equals to the number link pointing to a page. By analyzing out- and in-degrees values it is also possible to detect spam pages which would represent the outliers in the corresponding distributions.

In our set for example there are 158,290 pages with out-degree 1301, while according to the overall trend only 1,700 such pages are expected. Overall 0.05% of pages in the Set 2 have out-degrees at least three times more than suggested by the Zipfian distribution, and according to the manual inspection of a cross section, almost all of them are spam.

Similarly the distribution for in-degrees is calculated. For example 369,457 pages have the in-degree of 1001, while according to the trend only 2,000 such pages are expected. Overall, 0.19% of pages in the Set 2 have in-degrees at least three times more common than the Zipfian distribution would suggest, and the majority of them are spam.

Content Properties

Despite the recent measures taken by search engines to diminish the effect of keyword stuffing, this technique is still used by some SEOs who generate pages filled with meaningless keywords to promote their AdSense pages. Quite often such pages are based on a single template and even have the same number of words which makes them especially easy to detect using statistical methods.

For Set 1 the number of non-markup words in each page was recorded, so we can draw the variance of word count in pages downloaded from a given host name. The variance is plotted on the x-axis and the word count is shown on the y-axis, both axes are drawn on a logarithmic scale. Points in the left side of the graph marked with blue represent cases where at list 10 pages from a given host have the same word count. There are 944 such hosts (0.21% of the pages in Set 1). A random sample of 200 these pages was examined manually: 35% were spam, 3.5% contained no text and 41.5% were soft errors (a page with a message indicating that the resource is not currently available, despite the HTTP status code 200 “OK”).

Content Evolution

The natural evolution of the content in the Web is slow. In a period of a week 65% of all pages will not change at all, while only 0.8% will change completely. In contrast many spam SEO web pages generated in response to an HTTP request independent of the requested URL will change completely of every download. Therefore by looking into extreme cases of content mutation we search engines are able to detect web spam.

The outliers represent IPs serving the pages that change completely every week. Set 1 contains 367 such servers with 1,409,353 pages (97.2%). The manual examination of a sample of 106 pages showed that 103 (97.2%) were spam, 2 were soft errors and 1 adult pages counted as a false positive.

Clustering Properties

Automatically generated spam pages tend to look very similar. In fact, as already said above, most of them are based on the same model and have only minor differences (like inserting varying keywords into a template). Pages with such properties can be detected by applying clustering analysis to our samples.

To form clusters of similar pages the ’shingling’ algorithm described by Broder et al. [2] will be used. Figure 7 shows the distribution of the cluster sizes on near duplicate pages in Set 1. The horizontal axis shows the size of the cluster (the number of pages in the near-equivalence class), and the vertical axis shows how many such clusters Set 1 contains.

The outliers can be put into two groups. The first group did not contain any spam pages, pages in this group are more related to the duplicated content issue. In the same time the second group is populated predominantly by spam documents. 15 of 20 largest clusters were spam containing 2,080,112 pages (1.38% of all pages in Set 1)

To Sum Up

The methods described above are the examples of a fairly simple statistical approach to spam detection. The real life algorithms are much more sophisticated and are based on machine learning technologies which allow search engine to detect and battle spam with a relatively high efficiency at an acceptable rate of false positives. Applying the spam detection techniques enables search engine to produce more relevant results and ensures a more fair competition based on the quality of web resources and not on technical tricks.

References:

1. Dennis Fetterly, Mark Manasse, Marc Najork. “Spam, Damn Spam, and Statistics: Using statistical analysis to locate spam web pages” (2004). Microsoft Research.

2. A. Broder, S. Glassman, M. Manasse, and G. Zweig. “Syntactic Clustering of the Web”. In 6th International World Wide Web Conference, April 1997.



Natalie

profitworkshop asked:

www.Online-Profit-Workshop.com Search Engine Optimization SEO Consulting , Internet Marketing , Outsourced Employees & Professional Consultation Services located in Volusia County, Florida … “SEO consluting” “internet marketing” advertisting “seo hosting” Volusia

Ruby

SEO Service Company asked:


SEO Optimization is a popular internet marketing technique. SEO Marketing or SEO Optimization is a popular internet marketing technique. SEO Marketing or Optimization is the success secret behind several successful internet/online ventures.

You will spot several hundred websites which are devoted to SEO Marketing, but the real question is “What is the Best and Affordable Search Marketing SEO Strategy?” This question intrigues every single business owner.

Different types of Marketing Channels available:-

There are probably several techniques using which you can effectively promote your business online, offline, or you can use a combination of both online and offline marketing channels. However, if your business clients access your services through your business website, then you must genuinely consider SEO promotion for your website.

Some of the established marketing strategies are as given follow:-

1. Marketing Offline – Take for example if you are an owner of a food joint/restaurant then you will consider promoting your restaurant using various marketing channels available offline. Here you can target newspapers, hoardings, popular radio channels, and television.

2. Online & Offline Marketing – In some businesses you will find equal proportion of customers who visit your business online as well as offline. You can take an example of a travel company website which receives booking request online as well as offline.

Therefore these companies will consider promoting their websites using both offline as well as online marketing channels.

3. SEO Marketing – Some businesses are purely internet based for example web hosting companies, job sites, Ebay etc. In these businesses there is more probability of getting an online customer as compared to any other source. These businesses can avail full benefits of SEO marketing. If their business services/products are accessible by users while searching on Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, then it is highly likely that users will contact them to enquire about their services. In several internet based websites you can actually purchase the product online without leaving your room.

If you intend to promote your business website on search engines, then you should avail services from an affordable and economical seo company India. It will give you double benefits as compared to hiring a full time SEO Manager or hiring a dedicated team of SEO professionals.



Leo

Steven Johns asked:


This move is intended to vigorously compete with business VoIP telephony companies such as Packet8, Vonage and Skype. The Tpad solution has been specifically targeted at businesses that require a simple yet powerful, robust phone solution using the latest VoIP technology.

“As more and more businesses eventually learn about the extensive features and major benefits of VoIP phone solutions we wanted to be in a position to offer a low cost, easy to use package that would appeal to these businesses,” said Chris Morris, General Manager of Tpad.

“Tpad has designed a VoIP Solution that can be tailored for any SME in the World enabling Tpad to offer any customer the most flexible and affordable business VoIP phone service available todays competitive market.”

Tpad offers a wide range of next generation telecommunication solutions including a hosted and managed IP PBX package. The Hosted IP PBX, called Tpad Lite, will allow any company in the world to have their own private phone system hosted on Tpads global VoIP network.

Using the hosted solution companies will automatically reduce their cost of ownership on expensive communications hardware, as this solution allows them to simply rent access to the hardware from Tpad for a small monthly fee.

If you combine this saving with the massive savings on international VoIP calls using Tpad, this business VoIP solution is very powerful and competitive in the expanding business VoIP marketplace.

“We are very excited about having this excellent, user friendly business solution,” said Morris. “We have developed a communications package to fit in with todays demanding business needs. Using the Tpad solution will allow businesses to make massive savings on communications costs whilst enjoying the very latest calling features on this next generation platform.”

About Tpad:

Global VoIP ITSP, Tpad, offers internet-based telephony solutions for individual residential and business users as well as small to medium sized business enterprises (SMEs / SMBs).

Tpads hosted / managed IP PBX Tpads hosted / managed IP PBX solution is comprised of custom made call management software (Tpad Xchange) coupled with powerful business class features. Companies subscribing to Tpad Business VoIP pay a nominal amount per month for fully enterprise class IP PBX functionality.

Tpad also gives businesses an option to use any VoIP / SIP devices (ATA / IP Phone / Nokia WiFi Mobile / Softphone).

For additional company information, visit Tpad’s web site at http://www.tpad.com/business/

 



Greg

Hosting Web asked:


One should know about every aspect while starting a company. Following are the important factors to be looked at in order to run a hosting company successfully.

1.After having one’s own website the first most important factor that one considers is the design of his/her website. Designing of website does not only mean to put some text, links and a logo on a page but to design it properly else the website wont be termed as successful. Generic template that can be found online at templatemonster or any other temple site should also be ignored. It is fruitful to make effort and then create a well designed “professional” looking home page for one’s company. Concluding statement is that the customers who are quite new will never choose the hosting company which is armature no matter how great or cheap it is offering its packages.

2. The other step is to develop the website as a total package to its clients. Developing a website not only mean presenting the hosting packages and leaving it as it is rather one should also offer tutorials, articles, support forums etc. By the help of these additional services one is not only providing additional content for his/her clients, but if they are developed correctly will bring additional traffic to one’s site which will potentially lead to more sales.

3 One must understand the worth of search engines actually as more than 90% of one’s business will come likely directly from search engine results. So this is very right decision to optimize one’s site for search engines. Everyone should know that having best plan will be of no use if no one knows about it. One can easily get number of great information on how to create a website that is both user friendly just by searching SEO on net. There is infinite number of companies offering SEO services. But one should be very aware while opting one of them.

4. Find your niche. The hosting business is a huge industry with 100 percent competition. One can be successful in this industry just by finding the market and developing business to cater to that specific niche.

The idea of “if you build it they will come” can be true in 90’s. But the journey of internet in the year 2005 becomes very competitive and complex. One who wants to be successful and wants a proper stand in this tough competitive market he/she ha to plan his/her business so properly that it can run smoothly and is able to sort the problem from every angle. If one can develop a hosting company which has a professional design, some extra content, and search engine friendly and which targets a specific niche, then definitely he/she will achieve success. One have to be very careful and smart while starting and further running his/her business and should study each and every aspects but when he/she achieves these four then there is full chance of success for ever.



Stephanie