You post photos you are looking good in and avoid those that could become a reason to be ashamed of. But you don’t think that way while posting your friends’ photos, anything and everything goes.

But wait, your friends might not like you post their embarrassing photos to publicly exhibit them on a popular social networking site! Yes, Sophos, a security firm concludes this on the basis of a survey it carried out. Total 800 Facebook users spoke their mind on posting of photos.

Considerably, 83% of them believe in asking permission before posting a photo. Some even call it illegal to post a photo or video one doesn’t want to share. To add to the complications, if a friend has tagged you in photos you find unappealing, you can only prevent them from appearing on your profile page. But if they don’t violate the terms of use, they will continue showing up somewhere on the site.

However, out of all these idiocies, one can be turned into a thinkable issue to bring to the surface something meaningful. Is search engine optimization done to optimize a website for search engines or for users? Or it is helpful for both?

What SEO aims at?

Search engine optimization should, keeping everything else aside, aim at improving web usability, I believe. Here, the users must be the first priority. After all, SEO is optimizing a website for people who use search engines. Once web usability is arrived at, things should go smooth for everyone on the web. Then web usability would automatically add to the convenience for both, searching people and search engines.

SEO should do it this way:

SEO professionals ought to understand that search engine optimization is a process that involves technical elements as well as human elements. They need to make usability testing their priority. The first thing to have a hard clutch on is how people search and why do they do it.  Second thing, it is vital for an individual SEO professional to give everything to what they specialize in. A programmer won’t make good info architecture, I guess.

Still we have to find out what sort of SEO job is capable of taking us near to web usability. The first prerequisite is dexterous labeling of website content. That means website content should be well systematized so that it can be found without too much fuss.

Another significant thing is to know which content you want search engines to find and which not. Make sure that search engines have intact access to desired content. Then it is equally important that search engines don’t have access to undesirable content. If they have, let it be limited. Last but not the least – have room for users’ navigation and information related objectives. That’s how they land where they wanted to, that too with expected stuff.

Since Twitter has turned to be really big on news, almost every news channel has a Twitter feed today. Genuinely, before writing descriptive news stories for web, news organizations post news in the form of headlines immediately after they take place. And as soon as they are posted, they simultaneously reach their newsrooms and the Twitter accounts of journalists.

Now BBC decides to come up with special instructions for its journalists. At BBC, they want their journalists to make sure that any important information reaches BBC colleagues and their audiences before it shows on Twitter.

They have updated it on their official website making things and instructions clear to their staff. BBC’s correspondents, reporters and producers have been given refreshed breaking news guidance. Every one of them will have to provide written copies of any breaking news or exclusive update to official newsroom first. That’s how they can share it on all the communication media before it gets out.

It is simple; your content without an attractive title lands nowhere, even if it is a brilliant piece of writing and is also well placed. After all, if the title of your webpage isn’t attractive enough, why would one bother to waste their time hanging around? Only appealingly click-worthy titles do compel visitors to click and take them to your webpage. That is when visitors pay attention to everything on your page and rest does the quality of the content itself.

Since web users are too hasty to pay attention to every webpage (those with tedious titles, especially) out there, you need to be tricky enough to make them stop to come in. Know how you can direct the flow of always-in-hurry visitors to your webpage:

• The title should be able to create curiosity in visitors’ minds so that they presume that only a single click is taking them to something worthwhile. For instance, people click a title, which is an interesting question in itself, expecting the answer within the post.
• It remains vital to emphasize the “advantage” the visitors are going to benefit from, after visiting the post. A title beginning with “How You Can….” Will make visitors think.
• Keep overall appearance of your title, including length, rational. Titles fitting in fewer words (clarifying in nature, however) rock it for you.
• Make sure to provide in the main content what you offer in the title. Most often, people happen to doubt titles that include “Get Best…” Or “The Best Services…” and such claiming expressions.
  

Yes, cyber criminals have begun to promise website owners increased traffic. They take control of other websites and sell traffic through their online stores. Russian cyber criminals are doing it at their web shop. The web shops insert integrated frames into genuine websites and successfully redirect visitors to the website of the buyer.

These integrated frames or iframes can split webpages into parts. Then these parts are used to push in any element (windows, advertisements and the like) from the victim site to the buyer’s website. The height and width of an iframe, very cleverly, is kept zero so that it remains invisible to users.

A customer can buy traffic worth one thousand users from any country with four US dollars. However, regional prices differ depending upon which country’s hijacked web users you want to buy. For instance, 1000 Dutch visitors cost $US18 and 1000 Australian visitors will cost $US8

So is it a reality that Google has really become incapable of providing you with desired search results? It’s quite tough to believe this, especially when Google has already introduced Panda update to boost the quality of search results. What is it that Google is facing so much of criticism due to?

Well, this time it’s not the “content farm discussion” that people are growing furious about. Now, you will see people arguing against “search plus your world” thing. If we are to believe what people put forth to support their complaints, excess of Google+ mixing is turning Google+ worse at showing relevant search results. That’s how a majority of internet users find it happening out there.

Recently, some users talked of some problematic video results on Google and most often we find no-quality results too. Though Yahoo and Bing are not better in this regard, yet they haven’t stuffed their search results with so much of Google+ material, at least.

Since providing users with best search results has been the priority of Google, now, assumptions have been made that Google doesn’t seem to be serious about it any more. And it no doubt chuckles every one when it’s known that Google is still working on it and is frequent at updating its algorithm!

Google Public Alerts is going to be a major display area to broadcast emergency messages and alerts to alarm people. This may include notice awareness regarding storms and hurricanes. This service is carried out by Google Crisis Response Team of Google.org.

Public alerts will show up just above related search results. For detailed alerts, Google Public Alerts page has been created by Google Crisis Response. There you can check out any information on latest alerts on a map.

Google expect the service of Google Public Alerts to be practically helpful for people in the time of emergency. They look to get feedback from people so that they can testify the usability of the addition. You can see public alerts on google.org/publicalerts and give feedback through the feedback link on the homepage of public alerts.

The users have been trying to persuade Google+ to let them use their nicknames and pseudonyms on their profiles. After giving this matter the due thought, they’ve decided to make it in the users’ favor. Bradley Horowitz, VP of product management Google+, has announced this.

Interestingly, now Google+ users can write alternate names (nicknames and maiden names) with their common names, the way they want to. And now you can do this by simply editing your Google+ profile and the changes will appear in your complete public profile. However, this is to be kept in mind that the changes made by you will apply to your overall presence on Google.

Google consider this change as another step towards their efforts to make things user-friendly. Further, things would be depending upon the feedback from entire Google+ community. Get going with a complete and full-of-freedom Google+ profile now!

Now Google decides to have a check on them with help of its page layout algorithm. This change has been done keeping users’ comfort in mind. Internet users were found complaining about unrelated results. They said that it was frustrating to not find the real content out of search results. Is it logical to place tons of ads instead of the content?

When can a page said to have too many ads?

When can we say that a webpage has extra ads on it? It’s simple – when you see the visibility of content affected by so many advertisements out there. The user navigates the whole page but it is quite difficult to find the actual content.

Such webpages have more ads and less content above the fold. Immediately after opening the webpage, ads are the only visible thing and the original content is missing. Most of the websites are in a habit of making their top section a hub of ads. Since these websites do well by doing it, this technique has been prevailing.

How effective the new algorithm would be?

There are some interesting facts about Google’s “page layout algorithm.” This new algorithm considers punishing ads-driven sites, especially those that have insufficient informative content above-the-fold. If your website big on advertisements, you may find traffic considerably affected. And that’s what the new algorithm does.

Interestingly, your entire site gets punished because of a particular page that’s heavily stuffed with ads. Not only that page is punished, but the ranking of the whole website could suffer. Then if you lessen ads at the top of your webpage in order to resume ranking, it will take time. So don’t take things for granted and be rational while displaying ads. Otherwise, your attempt to take advantage of advertising, on the contrary, could damage your online business and status.

When interrogated, Google defends itself by referring to common man’s demand of making search results more personal and that’s why they include excerpts from Google Plus. However, people don’t seem to be convinced as they accuse Google of highlighting its social networking site in a biased manner.

People from every walk of life find it hard to believe and nullify the idea of common man expecting more personal search results. Also, they doubt too much of Google+ info coming so fast among (surprisingly on the top!) search results. Did you smell something weird in the air? And if it is about Google accentuating its own social network with a mind to outperform its competitors (Facebook and Twitter possibly?), the phenomenon of people being suspicious about it becomes obvious.

Something to be worried about, here, is the violation of users’ privacy. As we all know, internet users can normally see social info of those who they follow only after logging in. Now that Google+ content, even for any random search query, has begun to show up in Google search results, this points at the violation of privacy policy. Google has already been penalized for this and this matter would get settled on the basis of mutual consensus out there, hopefully.