Las Vegas Web Design Blog | The Web Squad

With more businesses looking to increase traffic to their websites, it is imperative to find quick but resourceful ways to separate from the crowd.  RDFa (“Resource Description Framework in attributes”) provides this to add extra information into their Google search result.  From a technical standpoint, RDFa allows websites to embed rich metadata which will then be picked up by search engines, like Google and Bing.

With RDFa in place, the search result will be enhanced with a “rich snippet”, where users will see reviews, ratings, and other information that can possibly spark more interest than the description alone.  For example, a restaurant can have a rich snippet of their n-star rating, n number of reviews, and show the price range of their menu items.  Another example is a company selling different products.  When a user searches for one of the products sold by this company, a rich snippet could include a photo, price, description, and a URL that leads directly to the product page.

How can this help your website?  “It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through,” said Google on their webmasters blog.

Reports have shown that this simple change has big results.  Businesses using e-Commerce websites have reported an increase in traffic of 30% or more when using RDFa, and search engines are seeing that more users are clicking through the site instead of returning to the search results page.

Technorati Tags:

RDFa, SEO, Search Engine Optimization

RDFa – The Next Step for Search Results by The Web Squad is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

ICANN Urges Adoption Of IPv6

The available number of unallocated Internet addresses using the older IPv4 protocol has dropped below 10 percent, according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).ICANN says there are just 24 address blocks (each block is about 16-million IP addresses) that it has not yet allocated to the Regional Internet Registries around the globe.

“This is the time for the Internet community to act,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and Chief Executive Officer.

“For the global Internet to grow and prosper without limitation, we need to encourage the rapid widespread adoption of the IPv6 protocol.”

IPv6 is the new protocol the Internet engineering community designed to deal with the increased demand for IP addresses, which are the unique identifiers that allow computers to communicate with one another over the Internet and to which DNS servers translate domain names. IPv4 addresses contain only 32 bits of data, while IPv6 addresses contain 128 bits.

“Quite simply it comes down to the fact that IPv6 is the future of the Internet,” said Beckstrom.

“The Internet now defines communication and commerce and to accommodate its explosive worldwide growth we need to act now to guarantee an online future that accommodates growth with few limitations.”

Beckstrom also said it is important for people to understand that many blocks of IPv4 addresses that have been allocated to registries have not yet been distributed to the public, so there will be no immediate global shortage of IPv4 addresses at the consumer level.

2010/01/18-Las Vegas, NV-The Web Squad’s article ranks number 1 out of 555 million results

The Web Squad blog titled “Are You Getting The Most From Your SEO?” currently ranks number 1 out of 555,000,000 million competing search results and articles for the search term “Are You Getting The Most From Your SEO?”. This article also ranks at number 3 out of 36,200,000 million results for “getting the most from your SEO” , a broader, more searchable keyphrase. While it has become increasingly more difficult to get your information seen in Google as the internet is so rapidly expanding, The Web Squad is staying on top with good old fashion hard work.

Although both queries have the majority of the article’s title in them, the amount of competing traffic is staggering and rising. “When we first published this article on our blog last month it debuted at number 4 out of 225,000,000 million results. This wasn’t unusual since it was just published, but we expected it to drop in the SERP’s fairly quickly…” said The Web Squad, “Instead, the amount of competing results increased as with our ranking.”

The Web Squad said, “We hoped this article would shine some light on the amateur tactics many SEO firms are using”.  Gaining more visibility in the marketplace has always been cornerstone to the methodologies that The Web Squad uses in their Online Reputation Management campaigns and just in this case they have seen an increase faster indexing results in the SERPs as well as stronger rankings. “We feel that low quality SEO and Reputation Management only hurts the customer in the long run. We hope to be the solution.”, said The Web Squad Online Reputation Management Team.

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s web spam team, talks about how Google will rank links coming from Facebook and Twitter.

In the latter part of 2009 both Google and Microsoft struck deals with Twitter almost simultaneously. This gave both search engines the ability to have real-time results for search queries. Microsoft hit the ground running with the deal and immediately released their version of real-time search also announcing that users with more followers will have their tweets ranked higher and those who essentially retweet will have those tweets ranked lower. Google, on the other hand, took its time to release its version of real-time search.

Google integrated real-time search with its traditional SERPs with its sources being a number of social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter of course. Sticking to tradition, Google did not release how they will rank tweets initially. However, in a recent interview with Amit Singhal, who led the development for real-time search for Google, with MIT’s Technology Review reviled one part of Google’s ranking algorithm for tweets.

From what Singhal said in the interview, Google will rank tweets in the same way it ranks web pages. It is, in essence, Google’s PageRank algorithm rewritten for Twitter; replace links with followers and you got its “TweetRank” algorithm. Singhal said that tweets will be ranked based not only on how many followers you have, but also “how reputable those followers are.”

The common practice of using hashtags in tweets may be a bad thing for those trying to rank their tweets. Hashtags are commonly a sign of low quality tweets and will become a part of Google’s spam control strategy. This may, in fact, cause a significant reduction in the usage of hashtags by Twitter users.

Being Google, they did not tell us everything about how they will rank tweets. Keep in mind that Twitter is Google’s only source for real-time search; Facebook, MySpace, and other social network, as well as blogs, will play a big role in real-time search. Though they have not released any official information, it is probable that Google will rank things like Facebook posts in the same way it will for Twitter.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Bing, Twitter, Search Engine Optimization

Google to Rank Tweets by http://thewebsquad.com/wordpress/index.php/2010/01/14/google-to-rank-tweets/ is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.technologyreview.com.