Thursday, 30 March 2017

Google Webmaster Tools and Verification of Ownership of Sites

What is “Google Search Console”?

Google Search Console
“Google Search Console” is the new name for “Google Webmaster Tools” (GWT).  It is a free tool or service by Google to webmasters. It’s a platform for Google to advice webmasters for optimizing their websites and to let them know status like google indexing on their websites. Other important advantage of using this tool is; it helps you to identify the errors or issues with your website and even helps you to know for any malware infection or spam issues in the website.


Why verify your site ownership with GWT?

verify your site ownership with GWTGoogle want to know whether you are the owner of the site. By verification method; “Paste meta tag” in your html, google understands you have access to the website code or html. By another verification method, “html upload to server”, Google understands you have access to your website server. Like this, each verification method is to prove your ownership with the website. Once you proved you are the owner of the website, Google’s privacy policy is getting satisfied and hence can give all the status and data for that website. Google can communicate with the webmaster through this platform about your website and you can resolve the issues with your website easily using these types of advices, messages and suggestions from Google. Thus the quality of your website will increase and hence getting chances to  rank high in search results.

How to verify ownership of a blog in Blogger.com with Webmaster tools?

verify ownership of a blog with Webmaster tools
  • Create a blog in your blogger.com account
  • Login to your Webmaster tools or search console.
  • Copy the URL of your blog with .com extension. ( If showing country specific extension, remove that and type it with .com and  give” /ncr “ (eg: http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/ncr). Press Enter and copy the blog URL with .com extension.
  • Go back to webmaster tools and paste the URL in the text provided at the home page with “Add a Property” button.
  • Click the ”Add a Property” button.
  • You will be redirected to a page with various verification methods. For blog, select the “HTML tag” verification method and copy the “Meta tag” data given in the text box. (eg: <meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”Hbp…..” />
  • Go back to Blogger Dashboard and click on, Theme and Edit Html. This will allow you to edit the html of your blog template.
  • Find the <head> section in your template’s html code and paste the copied “meta tag” data inside this head section code. Click on “Save theme” button.
  • Go to “Search Console” and press “Verify” button.
  • Now you will get a green tick with message, saying “ Congratulations, You have successfully verified your ownership of http:// yourblogname.blogspot.com
  • Your site ownership for blog in blogger.com is verified with webmaster tool and hence after 2 to 3 days, your site data will show in webmaster tools.
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Tuesday, 28 March 2017

“On-Page” Search Engine Optimization Techniques



Search Engine Optimization
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization; which means ‘how a webpage or website can be optimized’ for search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. SEO help the search engine bots to crawl the web pages easily; understand and index it to the database, based on the information available from the webpage.  

When a user request for a search,  Search Engines can list the most appropriate information from the “‘database indexing” based on category, keywords etc.  Proper SEO helps your website to rank high in search results naturally (organic) and thus increasing traffic to your website. Obviously increased traffic to your websites will boost your business and brand your products high.

There are several types of aspects and techniques in SEO. On-Page SEO is one of the most important techniques among them; that must apply for the organic ranking of a webpage. “On-page SEO” means all the optimization techniques that can be applied “on” your webpage. It is the techniques applied within the webpage/website itself for URL, html, content etc.

Important “on-page” factors that should apply on “On-page SEO Techniques”

On-Page Optimization

  1. Domain Names - Try to get a domain name that is relevant to the website business;  memorable, catchy , short and free of hyphens including important keywords.
  • Sub Directory Names- Make it Short; and relevant to the section or categories.
  • File Names – Include key words; Make it short, descriptive and relevant. Use hyphens between words. Try to use same keywords in ‘page title’ and ‘filename’.  Limit the file size below 101 K.
  • Design & Layout – Easily accessible, understandable, navigable and interactive. Minimise frames, ads, & java scripts; as they may block crawlers. Avoid fancy stuffs like Flash, Animations and rollovers. 
  • Keywords – Find keywords having low competition and high search volume. Choose right and relevant keywords that can attract targeted audience. Avoid Keyword stuffing. Give Keyword prominence by giving them in first heading or in the first paragraphs. Try giving keywords before a comma (,) or period (.)  Give keywords in content as ‘anchor text’. (<a href=”....”> some anchor text </a>). But Anchor text should not be the same “focusing keyword”. If do so google will not list the page. Keywords can place in “<title>” tags, <Meta name="keyword">, <Meta name="description">, heading tags like <h1> or <h2>, body content, ‘alt’ tags, inside comments, url or website address. 
  • Page Title – Meta title should be meaningful, without spelling mistake or grammatical errors. It should be unique for pages, impressive, descriptive and include “focusing keywords”.  It should match with body content. We can use min three words and a max of 8 to 10 words in a title. (Maximum 70 characters in total). It is wise to limit the total characters within 55 to 60 characters. Never give SEO title full of Capital letters as it will take more pixel width. Allowed pixel size for title is maximum 512. Give title in an attractive way. If we are not giving SEO title, google will take “<h1> content”  as SEO title. If <h1> also not found, it will take <h2>. Otherwise link reference from other sites/ blogs/forums also may take. 
  • Meta Description- There should not be any spelling mistake or grammatical errors in Meta description. It should be unique and descriptive with focusing keywords. But be careful to avoid keyword stuffing. If Meta description of a page is not good/valid; Google may take any content from the webpage or take descriptions from any Open Directory project if the site is listed in an ODP. Meta description can be up to 155 - 160 characters long. For blog posts, it should limit in 155 characters as google need to show dates before Meta description of a blog. Pixel width for Meta description is up to 1024 characters.
  • Image Optimization- Image name should be relevant and meaningful to the image. Use hyphen, if more than one word in the image name.  Including relevant keywords in image title may help your site to list in search results.  ‘Alt tag’ will increase the SEO value and hence give image ‘alt tag’ with proper keywords included in a meaningful way. If image’s ‘alt name’ is a focusing keyword, never give a hyperlink to another website or page. Reduce the Image size as possible to load the pages fast. 
  • Content Optimization- Unique and high quality content, relevant to the service offering by the webpage. Content should be simple and easily understandable. Give authority to the content. Include keywords in the content but b conscious about not to do keyword stuffing.  Arrange the content in paragraphs and give proper headings and sub headings. 

These are the major On-page SEO techniques that should use in your website, to increase your webpage ranking. Using any one of them alone will not give you the result; But if apply all the techniques together in your site will definitely give better ranking in search results.

Read my post about Search History

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Friday, 24 March 2017

Brief History of Website, Search Engines & Google


The First website



The First Website by Berners Lee
World's first website, was developed by 'Timothy John Berners-Lee', (A British computer scientist at CERN) on 6th August 1991. He developed the website as an information sharing system between the scientists in universities. The address of that first created webpage was  "http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html" and you  can  still view it by clicking on this website address.

Need of Search Engines



Right Information SearchOver the years, many more websites were developed offering many types of information for the internet users. Gradually the internet became crowded with websites; and hence came the need of a search engine to provide right information for the users, from the huge list of websites in the internet.

Search Engines- Evolution & History

From 1990 - 93, some search engine techniques were established primarily based on sorting. The sorted search lists made finding the information easier than earlier. The First search engine developed was ‘Archie’, with this primary sorting techniques.

Search Engines HistoryIn the year 1994, “Infoseek”, “Galaxy”, “Alsta Vista”, “Webcrawler”, “Yahoo” and “Lycose” search engines, came into picture to give more quality search results for the users. These search engines allowed natural language queries in search. “Webcrawler” introduced first crawler that indexed entire pages. “Yahoo” introduced a man-made description with each URL.  “Look Smart” was introduced in 1995. They competed with “Yahoo” by increasing inclusion rates back & forth. 

In 1996, “HotBot” and “Google” were developed. Later yahoo bought “Hotbot” (in 2003). In 1997, ‘ask.com’ and in 1998, “msn search” were launched. “MSN” was bought by “Netscape“ in 1998 and “AOL” bought “Netscape” in the same year itself.

In 1999 more advanced search engines came, ‘Overture’ and ‘All the web’.  ‘Overture’ was the first company who successfully provided ‘pay-per-click’ placement search service. ‘Overture’ bought ‘Alta vista’ & ‘All the web’; and later in 2003, yahoo acquired “Overture”.

In 2005, “Overture” owner introduced new search engine ‘Snap’. But it was too complicated and could not succeed as expected. In 2006, ‘Microsoft' introduced ‘Live Search’ and in 2009; rebranded it as ‘Bing’ which is a familiar search engine today. In 2008 former Google employees developed “Cuil” search engine as a competitor for ‘Google’. But ‘Cuil’ failed to give accurate results and the response time was slow. Gradually “Cuil” became a failure and is dead now!


The Search Engine Giant - Google's History

Google Logo HistoryThough Google was developed in January 1996, It was initially named as ‘Backrub’. ‘Larry Page’ and ‘Sergey Brin’ worked on it and launched it as ‘Google’ search engine in 1998.  

In 1999, Google got funding from few investors and ‘AOL’ selected ‘Google’ as the search partner. In 2000, yahoo also selected Google as their search partner. Google introduced ‘Google Toolbar’ and relaunched ‘Adwords’ to sell ads on CPM basis. In 2002, ‘AOL’ used Google to deliver search related ads and in 2003 Google launched ‘adsense’ to sell targeted ads on other websites. 

Over years, Google became the most popular search engine on internet. Their unique and improving algorithm has made them to succeed and get trust over other search engines.

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