Welcome Back Flickr

The ban on online photo management and sharing application website Flickr was lifted yesterday.

Flickr site was blocked by UAE authorities in 2005 a year after the site was launched.

About Flickr

Flickr was created by former game designers Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake in February of 2004. Flickr, which began as a photo-sharing feature of their gaming project, has since then blossomed into one of the premiere photo-sharing sites on the web. Yahoo purchased Flickr for $35 million in March of 2005. Since then Flickr continues to compete with other photo-sharing giant Photobucket.

On September 19,  the photo-sharing site Flickr announced on its blog that they are now hosting 5 billion photos.

User named “yeoaaron” was the one who uploaded the site’s 5 billionth photo . The image shows the Woodwards Collage in Vancouver, B.C.

Traffic Stats

What You Need To Know About Google Instant

Google released early this month a new feature called Google instant, a new technology from Google that allows faster results. The news got SEO’s talking about it. Though it will make search queries faster, not everyone became a fan of this new feature. Some, indeed, fear that it will kill SEO or worried about the effects the new feature will have on SEO.

Here’s what you need to know about Google Instant:

Google Instant is a feature that predicts what you’re searching for and shows results as you type.

Both the predicted queries and the search results change as you continue to typing in search box.

Now with Google Instant, you may notice an increase in impressions because your site will appear in search results as users type in a key.

Impressions are measured in three ways with Google Instant

1. Your site is displayed in search results as a response to a user’s completed query (e.g. by pressing “enter” or selecting a term from autocomplete). This is the traditional model.

2. The user begins to type a term on Google and clicks on a link on the page, such as a search result, ad, or a related search.

3. The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

If you don’t want to see results as you type, you can turn Google Instant off by clicking the link next to the search box on any search results page.

If you havn’t noticed. Google have dropped the second search box at the bottom of the result page. This means that if you are at the bottom of search results, you’ll now have to scroll all the way up to modify your search query.

Google won’t show results for searches it deems pornographic, violent, hateful unless you actually hit enter or click the search button like if you search for the word “naked”.

Benefits of Google Instant

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

What people are saying about Google Instant?

Matt Cutts’ answer to  “Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?”

I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time.

Steve Rubel, SVP and Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, a division of Edelman – the world’s largest independent PR firm says that “Google Instant makes SEO irrelevant“.

No two people will see the same web. Once a single search would do the trick – and everyone saw the same results. That’s what made search engine optimization work. Now, with this, everyone is going to start tweaking their searches in real-time. The reason this is a game changer is feedback. When you get feedback, you change your behaviors.”

Stefan Spencer founder of Netconcepts says…

Google is in business to build shareholder value. That’s done by maximizing profits and operating cash, both short term and long term. It’s all fine and good for Google to say it [Instant] was done to provide searchers with a better user experience. (Google’s official position is that Instant can save 2 to 3 seconds per search, which I have trouble buying, incidentally.) But I believe financial incentives are at the heart of it.

The bottom line is that Google Instant drives growth in ad revenues. That’s because it displays more ads to more users (5 to 7 times the number of results are displayed now via Google Instant than before). And it motivates AdWords advertisers to compete more vigorously for the top predictions coming out of Google Suggest. These terms are already expensive, and now they’re more so, thanks to Google Instant.

Read more on SEO experts view of Google Instant.

Related articles

• How Will Google Instant Affect Search Marketing? (firstrate.co.nz)
• 10 Almost Instant Responses to Your Google Instant Questions (hubspot.com)
• Will Your SEO Efforts Change Due To Google Instant? (seroundtable.com)

Reason Why You Need SEO?

As a SEO specialist, Dubai-based, I’ve seen the numbers of  companies offering SEO services growing rapidly. But does website and company owners know about this kind of service? If yes, how many are they? I’m sure only few are aware what SEO can give your business and I hope this simple illustration will give better understanding why search engine optimization can help.

Let’s say Dubaian is planning to put up a restaurant business and he wants it to be located inside a mall.

Then for him to get more people to eat at his restaurant, he needs to find out the top 10 most visited malls.

The simple reason why Dubaian needs to built his restaurant in the top 10 visited malls is simply because the more people going to that mall, the more chances many will try and eat at his restaurant. We all know that the above Dubai shopping malls like  Dubai Mall, Mall of the Emirates, Deira City Centre, Dubai Festival Centre are the busiest malls specially on weekends so these are a good location for Dubaian.

The same thing goes when you have a website. For you to be able to get more traffic, more leads and more sales, your website must appear on the 1st page or top 10 results of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. A website really needs to be on the first page of results to get any real chance of being seen for a variety of terms and one way of achieving that is by doing SEO.

Hope this example helps you understand why you need search engine optimization or SEO.

The Internet Show Middle East 2010

The Internet Show is a series of free seminars and exhibition showcase. It is the only event that brings together Big, Medium and Small business, all eager to find new ways of doing internet business. It is the best place to discover how internet technology and solutions can help your business.

The event will showcase the latest technology and hottest internet business solutions in  Digital marketing and advertising , Web 2.0 and social networking, e-Commerce and payments, Content management and streaming and hosting and infrastructure.

There will be over 40 Free educational seminars that you can choose from which sad to say I can’t attend and listen to them all as there are 2 different locations – the Yahoo Maktoob Theatre and Internet Show Theatre. So just choose which topics interest you most.

Internet Show mentioned 8 reasons why YOU must to attend this event.

1. Over 40 FREE educational seminars
Held in themed theatres, you can customise your own programme to meet your needs. Leading industry experts will be sharing experience and expertise. Register online to access these free of charge.

2. The latest products and solutions
Technology is changing so quickly. Here you’ll be able to see first hand the best solutions available today.

3. The Internet Show is for all businesses
Small, medium and big business, anyone doing business online. For the experienced and for the wannabe’s.

4. Meet the leading players
The people that are shaping the internet in Middle East will be here. Shouldn’t you be?

5. Don’t get left behind
The internet changes so fast. What’s hip today will be gone tomorrow. Attending The Internet Show guarantees you’ll be up-to-date.

6. It’s the only business internet show in Middle East
This isn’t for techies. It’s for real business people. The people with the vision and strategy. (Techies also welcome!)

7. Network online and offline
Network face to face at The Internet Show, online with “Contact” our business networking tool and by joining our Twitter and LinkedIn discussions.

8. It’s only two days. And it’s free.
You’ll learn loads, solve problems and come away with real ideas that will transform your business. What a productive way to spend two days.

Here’s more. For every visitor, there will be a free Google Adwords voucher to be given away.

Visit www.internetshow.ae for more information and seminar session details and to enquire about exhibiting and sponsoring, email joseph.ridley@terrapinn.com.

What You Need to Know About Meta Description

Meta Description Tag

Although this tag does not weigh heavily in search engine ranking algorithms, it remains a powerful element of an effective SEO campaign. As the title tag, Meta description tag will always appear in search results. In general what you see in the search engine ranking pages are the Title tags then the description tag followed by its specified link page. It becomes a very important element to help attract visitors to click the link on your site.

Those who take the time to look through search results, read the titles and descriptions to find sites that are most likely to give them the information they seek are more likely that to be a targeted visitors.

The general rule is that you want every description of your tags to be unique. The description must be maximum 150 characters summary of what visitors can expect to find on this page and this page only. Descriptions for each page must be unique from each other. Be sure to summarize the page in a unique way.

But is not always advisable to put description tag on every page. There are some cases where it would be a better not put description tag. If you are targeting long tail keywords, then do not put meta tags. Description tags would be best use when targeting broader keywords.

An explanation to this is that if you go after long tail phrases in your article or blog post, there is a lot of variations that can come up in a description of 150 characters. If there are no description tags created, search engines will imports from the page snippets based on search made if those long-tail words are on the content.