According to reports flooding the internet highway, the smartphone, code-named Nexus One, has been designed by a handpicked Google team and will be made by Taiwanese electronics giant HTC, exclusively for Google.

The device is expected to boast of features like a capacitive touchscreen; Android 2.1 platform; onboard camera; WiFi; GPRS; EDGE; 3G; Bluetooth; A-GPS (with Google Maps) and 3.5mm audio jack.

However, what we’re most curious about is whether the smartphone will come with a secondary front-facing camera (to support video calls) and whether it will include FM Radio; microUSB port; microSD card slot and a slide-out Qwerty physical keyboard. And, most importantly, whether it will be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor.

It’s not known still whether Google will take the exclusive route like Apple to market and sell its smartphone or whether it will choose to flood the market with its device by making it available with every possible retail chain and network operator.

But one thing is certain – irrespective of the strategy Google adopts, its smartphone has already caught everybody’s attention and it sure will sell like hotcakes when it launches.

This new Microsoft-Yahoo partnership could give the two companies some much-needed leverage in their ongoing — and until now, separate — battles to chip away at Google’s stranglehold on the search market. With Carol Bartz still new at the helm of Yahoo and focused on making the onetime online pioneer hip and fresh again, and Microsoft’s Bing search service only a few months old, neither company has been able to make a noticeable dent in Google’s well-polished, and well-funded, armor.

So a strategy that has them pooling their resources and industry might makes a lot of sense, says Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group Inc.

“Both Microsoft and Yahoo need this deal if they harbor any hopes of getting back into the lucrative search game,” said Olds. “Search has become the most reliable way of capturing eyeballs on the Internet, and having a popular search engine is the basis for all of Google’s success. Both Microsoft and Yahoo have invested billions of dollars in trying to build search and content portals that would be able to command Google-like ad revenues. But both have failed to blunt Google’s revenue growth individually. Together they might have a better chance.”

Both companies have also been making separate moves in recent months.

In June, Microsoft unveiled its new search engine, Bing, an update to its far-from-beloved Microsoft Live Search. And with Microsoft’s advertising power and a lot of media attention behind it, Bing has shown strong numbers just out of the gate. Early this month, Web analytics firm StatCounter reported that Bing may have nibbled away at Google’s commanding lead in the search arena, but it definitely hasn’t taken a big bite. While Google’s share dipped from 79.07% to 78.48% in June, the share held by Microsoft’s search site grew from 7.21% to 8.23%.

Yahoo is hanging in at a distant second place to Google with 11.04% of the market.

StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen described Bing’s progress in the market as “steady, if not spectacular.”

And for its part, Yahoo last week unveiled the beta of a newly overhauled homepage, whose promised features include the ability to integrate with social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. The changes are an apparent attempt to recapture some of the hip cachet the site had during its heyday.

The problem for Microsoft and Yahoo is that despite their efforts, Google still looms far ahead of both. Olds, however, said they have a much better shot at their shared opponent if they work together.

“Separately, they have small fractions of Google’s viewership. But together, with a well-executed plan and solid cooperation, they have a shot of at least giving Google a run for its money,” he added. “Google needs to take this seriously, which I think they will. Microsoft and Yahoo have a lot of resources to throw at this, and they now have a partnership and a plan.”

Computerworld.com

Companies out there are charging anything from £99 upwards for these type of services, and as soon as you sign up they want you to use ridiculous search terms that are never going to be used buy prospective customers. And the keywords you actually want used, will be something to ‘work towards’, a process ‘that will take time’ and so on.

For example if your website is www.davidcomplandaccounts.co and you use the keyword ‘davidcomplandaccounts’ with no spaces, the company who offer this service will consider this achieving their side of the bargain, though of course no one is going to find your site. You are simply not going to get first page listing with the term ‘UK Accounts’, without resubmission, care, time and attention, whatever they tell you.

So how do you actually getting top ranking. Well the easy answer though not very popular one, is that it will take time.

There are several techniques though that are invaluable and will aid the submission, listing and ranking process:

Change your textual content and Meta Tags before each submission. Ranking is simply to do with the importance that Google gives to a website, related to a series of keywords and phrase.

Clear textual navigation will ensure that the Search Engine spiders are able to find, catalogue and list all of the relevant page of your website.

Incoming links from highly ranked sites. This means contacting related sites, though not direct competition to request mutual or ideally exclusive links to your site.

Keyword frequency. Therefore how often your chosen keywords, both in your HTML source and those used on submission to Search Engines occur in the text of your site. More importance is given to keywords in your title tag, headings ( h1, h1, h1 etc), text in bold, plus links.

Always choose a relevant title for your submitted page. The title should reflect both your keywords and URL. Each link page should have a different title.

Imagine heavy web pages are less Search Engine friendly, therefore relevant keyword based text is the most effective.

Try and avoid an extremely image heavy web design, it used to be the case that ‘alt’ tags were given some level of important, other than for image listing on Search Engines this no longer seems to be the case.

So basically Search Engine ranking takes patience, there is no magic wand technique, but if you follow the steps above you can achieve placement and exposure for your website.

by Ashley Smith

Acknowledged Web Design

Google will index your site regardless of using a sitemap, however, this tool makes it easier for Google to index those pages you want it to. You can exclude pages if you really want to, but you can use a generator to create the XML formatted file.

Here are some generators

– DMXZone provide a Dreamweaver extension that will build a sitemap for you in the correct format – www.dmxzone.com
– Google provide a long list here code.google.com

– Google talks about Sitemaps here – www.google.com

2. Content Analysis

One of the things Google hates is duplicate content, even worse is duplicate Titles and Descriptions (These are the important Meta Tags)

Webmaster Tools will allow you to see if there are any pages with duplicated titles or duplicated descriptions. This is a very important tool to get the most out of these tags

3. Web Crawl Diagnostic

Once Google has crawled (indexed) your website, you hope all of your pages are visible in the index. This tool can help you find out if Google had problems finding and pages.

Obviously, if Google can find a page, it wont be in the search engine listings.

This can be bad links, moved content or other easily picked up issues.

4. External Links

This shows all of the links into your website from other pages on the internet.

The best thing is the link on the right hand side that allows you to see all of the inbound links.

(Note: this does not show all of the times your website is mentioned, only the working links people can click on to find you)

In basic search engine terms, the more inbound links the better for you

5. Geographic Targeting

This one is bit more advanced and will affect a smaller number of people. One of the key changes in Google’s delivery of search results is the pre filtering that is done when you search.

Google will filter your results, even if you don’t ask it to.

As an example, if you do a search for a topic and DO NOT select the “web pages from this country” button your results are still biased towards the country Google believes you are in.

Alternatively, if you select the “web pages from this country” button, you will get results that Google think are directed to that country.

How does it do this?

It shows results for either websites with a country specific suffix ie .nz for New Zealand, or websites that are hosted in that country.

However, if you have a .com website hosted not in New Zealand, you will not be found in the search results for that country specific search.

The solution is to use Google’s Geographic Target, where you can specify the county you want to target (Only one, though)

There are plenty of other Tools, including Keywords, Search Phrases etc.

Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index.

We use a huge set of computers to fetch (or “crawl”) billions of pages on the web. The program that does the fetching is called Googlebot (also known as a robot, bot, or spider). Googlebot uses an algorithmic process: computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site.

Google’s crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits of each these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index.

Google doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, and we keep the search side of our business separate from our revenue-generating AdWords servic

Googlebot processes each of the pages it crawls in order to compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page. In addition, we process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes. Googlebot can process many, but not all, content types. For example, we cannot process the content of some rich media files or dynamic pages.

When a user enters a query, our machines search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user. Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors, one of which is the PageRank for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content.

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. Our Webmaster Guidelines outline some best practices that can help you avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

Google’s Related Searches, Spelling Suggestions, and Google Suggest features are designed to help users save time by displaying related terms, common misspellings, and popular queries. Like our google.com search results, the keywords used by these features are automatically generated by our web crawlers and search algorithms. We display these suggestions only when we think they might save the user time. If a site ranks well for a keyword, it’s because we’ve algorithmically determined that its content is more relevant to the user’s query.