Panguso, China's New Search Engine

The new search engine created by Xinhua, the Chinese state-run news agency, allows its users to search for news, web sites, images, videos and audio best fitted within the government's guidelines. These guidelines also known as “The great firewall of China” is best describe by The Atlantic's James Fallows as "a barrier to keep its Internet users from dealing easily with the outside world". he further points out that the guidelines is overall "complex structure of monitoring and censorship".

Within the search engine market in China, Baidu holds 76% of the share market according to a Beijing-based market research firm. Google's attempt to enter the market resulted in various PR fiascos and the relocation of their servers outside of China. Google has now been analysed as holding less than 20% market share. Therefore, it seems Panguso will have more challenges than following the governments guidelines.

Facebook's New Photo Viewer

You probably have noticed Facebook launched their new photo viewer. Personally I'm not a fan, however they informed users on their blogs that this new feature is both faster and more user friendly than the previous one. In more technical terms, one of their engineers, Stefan Parker stated: "By re-designing the Photo Viewer, users now view over 5% more photos, equating to an increase in roughly a billion photo views every day." 

Regardless of my personal opinion on the feature's appearance in conjunction with the whole site, I have to admit that it works faster than the previous features and seem more interactive.

Here's a screenshot of the latest photo viewer, feel free to also admire my puppy.

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3 Key Points to SEO (Basics)

This article is written to give a basic understanding of SEO, however it is important to note that what is written here is not the full spectrum or detailed aspects of search marketing practice.

Below are the three points anyone interested in SEO should know, this includes business owners, marketeers or those who are new to SEO.

    1.    Submitting your site to the search engines

A search engine will only show websites it has in its database. It is important to submit your site to the key search engines. This can be done by creating a site map and submitting it via webmaster tools. If you are unsure about how to create a site map an easier, albeit less effective way to submit your site to search engines is to do it via their submission page.

Additionally, it is also important to submit your site to various relevant directories. This will not only help to get your site found by search engines but may also help to drive traffic.

    2.    Content is king - Part I

A search engine will rank a website high in the search results due to numerous factors, one of them being web content. The content of a website, especially text content, allows a search engine to determine whether a website is relevant to the search query performed by the end user.

For this reason you will hear a common phrase in SEO world that says 'content is king'. The general rule of thumb is to write content for your website that is engaging to the user while also using your core keywords within the page, as frequently as possibly but without the text sounding in any way unnatural.

    2.1    Content is king - Part II

Equally, you should also generate useful articles, or write a blog, that links back to the most relevant pages of your website. And rather than writing 'click here' for more information, you should always use keyword rich anchor text (sometimes referred to as hyperlinks) to link back to your site. In our case, for example, we might be writing something along the lines of 'for more information about our fantastic SEO Services please contact ...'. As you can see, the anchor text we use is relevant to what we want people to find us under in search engines.

    3.    Link Building

Link building is another important, if not the most important, area to focus on to get a website ranking high in the search results. A link from another website to your site is like a vote of confidence, or a reference. For this reason, search engines value this highly.

There are various methods of Link building, two of which have been mentioned already: gaining directory listings (generally this is considered reasonably low value); and writing articles that link back to your website. There are a great many other methods involved in link building and they are too numerous to be included in this article. Check back soon though for a more comprehensive article that will be dedicated to link building.

And a final word of warning. Be careful when link building. Several methods are considered to be unethical and, if you are found to be employing these methods, can get you banned by the search engines.

So, if you do want more information about our fantastic SEO Services that take the headache out search marketing, then contact one of our SEO Consultants today. Call 020 7001 2000 or Email: info@piponsolutions.com