According to Twitter;

Twitter’s hosting provider, NTT America, will begin scheduled maintenance at 11:00PM PT/06:00AM UTC. This maintenance will last approximately five hours.

During this maintenance, there will be periods of time when some users are unable to use Twitter. We do not expect these periods will last for the entire maintenance window.

Twitter maintenance

Source:

http://status.twitter.com/post/887078739/scheduled-downtime-duration

But what is in fact “The 1st Amendment and you”? What is “1 for all” and what is “1forall.us”?

Yes – the answer is here;

The First Amendment grants everyone in the U.S. the freedom to publish, express views, practice religion, assemble and petition government. Join news organizations, Google and others in celebrating the First on July 1. Join us at 1forall.us.

What to do?

- Submit a 30 second video that demonstrates your freedom to speak, rock, or assemble.
- Winners will be featured on YouTube, TV, and at the Newseum in Washington D.C.
-  All video entries are due by July 25th.

1 for All is the joint effort of educators, journalists, and others who believe that the American public would benefit from a greater understanding of the First Amendment. Google and YouTube support 1 for All.

Keep it up Google….

My colleague just let me know go to Google.com and click the link “ Learn about your First Amendment rights with 1 for All “. (Exactly under Google’s logo) and found the link http://www.google.com/landing/1forall/ . Yes this is showing the 404 Not Found Error with the message

“The requested URL /landing/1forall/ was not found on this server.”

Oochhh… We can’t expect these from Google…. Ahhhh!!!

Google 404 Not Found Error

(Google’s error found at the time of this post).

There are many rumors about the FaceBook Killer stories but in fact according to Digg founder “Kevin Rose”, Google is about to launch a social profile service called, aptly, “Google Me.” Rose stated on Twitter earlier today that he heard a “huge rumor” from a “very credible source” that Google is about to unveil what is apparently a Facebook competitor, no other details forthcoming.

Google_Me

Source:

http://twitter.com/kevinrose/status/17132231117

There’s been a lot of talk amongst the SEO industry that says this is true.  They’re saying that a domain they registered for five to ten years got indexed up to ten to fifteen times faster than the domain they registered for only one year.

But what is reality, let me try to explain this briefly; 

In older days it was considered that long domain registration would impact the ranking in Google and other search engines. And lot of software (web analytics and others) included this factor that if your domain is registered less than one year, your site will slow down and will not have suitable ranking in search engines. Even lot of articles is available, that you should register your domain more than five years.

But in fact I don’t believe on this. This is an agreement between you and your service provider. There are 200 ranking factors of Google and hardly 10 to 20 Google reveled. The rest of all are assumptions by internet experts. In fact the DNS, registrar companies (I will not mention any name) might spread this information on the internet that you should have to register your domain name more than five years if you want a good ranking.(May be they want to increase their revenue by spreading this wrong information).

In Short – There’s nothing a ranking impact to register your domain name more than five years. The main ranking factors includes the content of the site, structure of the site, SEO Metadata, correct use of all Metatags, inbound links, out bound links, Google Page Rank, domain age (how old the domain is, not when this will expire), On page and Off page optimization etc.

You’r comments are most welcome.

Twitter’s team is working on incorrect tweet counts. As they said on blog

Some users are noting inconsistencies in tweet counts. This is purely a display issue and the tweets are not lost or missing. We are working to fix this underlying problem with counts.

Their site availability issues due to failed enhancement of timeline cache.

From Twitter’s blog

We’re currently experiencing site availability issues resulting from the failed enhancement of a new approach to timeline caching. Our infrastructure and operations engineers are currently working to resolve this. We’ll update you soon with an ETA.

Update: 10:17 PM PDT:  Users may temporarily experience missing tweets from their timelines. They will be restored shortly.

Alt Tag (alternative to image tag) can help, but it’s not going to be a major factor unless your site is made almost exclusively of images.

Alt Tag provides a search engine with a “translation” of the content of the image (a search engine can’t read the text in an image). Alt tag is presented in place of an image if the link to the image is broken or the visitor is using a text only browser. Alt tag in your web pages is a good design practice, regardless of how much it helps to improve your Search Engine Ranking.

In short, when you’re trying to create effective page content that will appeal to both human visitors and search engine spiders, you need to get the most out of every page element. One way to do this is to use ALT or TITLE attributes wherever you can.

In Definitions:

The alt attribute is used in HTML and XHTML documents to specify alternative text (alt text) that is to be rendered when the element to which it is applied cannot be rendered. In HTML 4.01, the attribute is required for the img and area tags. It is optional for the input tag and the deprecated applet tag.

Source: wikipedia.org

If you use images in your web pages, its good practice to include Alt Tag for every image that a visitor to your site will see. It can also help your Search Engine Rankings, particularly if the Alt Tag contains a keyword or two relevant to the topic of the web page of which it is a part.

Examples of Alt Tag:

<img alt=”Your Text Here”>

<area alt=” Your Text Here “>

<input alt=” Your Text Here “>

Or

<img src=”Wedding Cake.jpg” height=”200″ width=”200″ alt=”Wedding Cake”>

Benefits of Alt Tag:

- Alt Tag provides more detail for an image or the destination of a hyperlinked image.

- Alt Tag provides much needed information for people who surf the web with graphics turned off, and people who surf the web with text-only browsers.

-  Alt Tag enables and enhances access for people with various disabilities.

- This assist in navigation when a graphics-intensive site is being viewed over a slow connection, enabling site visitors to make navigation choices before graphics are fully rendered.

But in fact since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use Meta keyword tag, along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them.

In definitions;

Meta keyword tags are optional features, which the Website may include. The only purpose of these Meta tags, since they do not even appear on the page, is to list the keywords most relevant to the Web page for better, more accurate search engine identification. This is an HTML tag to describe the related keywords in your document.

Or

Meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based search engines to index along with the rest of what you’ve written on your site.

Example of Meta keyword tag:

For SeoShout.com;

<meta name=”keywords” content=”SeoShout.com, SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Web Traffic, Boost Traffic, Google, Yahoo, Bing” />

One way to use the Meta keywords tag is to emphasize a particular word or phrase in the main body of your text. For example, if you have a website all about cakes, and want to reinforce the word “cake”, then what you would want to do is have that word sprinkled liberally throughout your web copy, and also inserted into your Meta keywords.

Another option is to insert unusual words or synonyms into your Meta keywords tags that you don’t actually have on the page itself. For instance, if you have a cake website, a good idea would be to put “entertainment”, “leisure”, “birthday”, and “wedding” name in your keyword Meta tags. This would increase the odds of someone stumbling onto your page that only was looking for cake; however, an even better way to increase those odds would be to include his name throughout your copy as well.

Common abuse of Meta keyword tags was and still is the repetition of words. Spammers found that if they repeated keywords enough times in this meta tag, the search engines would “think” they were relevant to the page and perhaps give it a high ranking for those keywords. Because of this abuse, too much repetition will now hurt you rather than help you. Never insert the same word twice in a row in this tag, even if you’re using different variations. You can use the same word in different phrases, but never use that word more than three or four times within the tag.

Most of the time Google update page rank unexpectedly. Seems like this time page rank comes as good news for every one. For me SEOShout.com page rank is still the same, but my new domains and projects which I have started last month got Page rank 3 and Page rank 2.  One of my blog for which I have done only On site SEO got Page rank 2 and another one following the same league got Page rank 1.

Check out your site’s Page Rank now and share if it got bumped up.

For those who are new to this term, PageRank is a scale to check popularity through backlinks and many other factors by Google and it affects your visibility on search engine. Google PageRank term was named after Larry Page who developed this concepts of PageRank (PR) for Google.

What is Google Page Rank and Facts:

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.

PageRank is a numeric value that tells how important a page is on the entire web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is basically casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

According to Google:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

Meta description tag contribute to your search engine ranking, and the meta description tag influences the likelihood that a person will actually click on the search engine results page and visit your site. It designed to provide a brief description of your site which can be used by search engines or directories.

The Meta description Tag usually consists of 25 to 30 words or less using no more than 160 to 225 characters total (including spaces). Currently Google displays up to 160 characters, Yahoo! up to 165 and MSN up to 200+. The Meta description also shows up in many search engine results as a summary of your site.

Directories like Yahoo and the ODP (Open Directory Project) show the page title and description that you entered (and the editors modified) on their manual submission form.

For SeoShout.com the Meta description is as;

<meta content=”Search Engine Optimization – Tips & Tricks How to Boost Web Traffic from Search Engines Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.” />

Every page must have a unique Meta description. The Meta description is used by directories, web resources and other webmasters and site owners when they link to your page. If you have a concise and catchy Meta description that really sums up your site’s topic, your site will more readily be reviewed and favored by these sources.

Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn’t very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. Create descriptions that accurately describe each specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and consider using page-level descriptions everywhere else. You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don’t have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages.

For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one sentence description. For larger database driven sites, like product aggregators, hand written descriptions are more difficult. In the latter case, though, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged. Just make sure that

your descriptions are not “spammy.”

Meta descriptions do not guarantee top placement in the search engine ranking pages (SERPS) but they do help.  Since webmasters have abused the use of Meta descriptions over the years to increase their rankings, search engine creators have had to de-emphasize the importance of these tags.  They are still an important factor however since they help people decide whether or not to click through to your website.  When writing your Meta description tags, be sure to write short, concise, relevant, descriptions which entice the user to click through to your website.

Importance of Meta description:

Meta description tag will encourage the searcher to take the next step and visit your Web site.  In essence, a well-written Meta Description Tag will increase the Click Through Rate (CTR) of your organic search listing.

Google and MSN/Bing use it to display the description of a web page in the SERPs. This is a great chance for you to control want searches see when your pages come up in the SERPs.

In less competitive markets it can significantly affect the rankings and in more competitive markets description tag is only good for the description Google displays.

Meta description can be used for Search Engine as a text to be displayed in the SERP’s, which can help increase the number of clicks if done correctly.

Meta description helps that the pages in your site don’t get penalized for duplicate content, as if you had the same description for every page on your site.