Rapid Web News

Web visibility is of vital importance to any web business, be it e-commerce or otherwise. The visibility of your website is one of the key focuses of search engine optimisation.SEO will increase your web visibility through by improving the rankings of your websites in search engine results pages (or ‘SERPs’).

SERPs are the pages you land on, as an Internet user, when you enter search terms into an online search engine. They present a list of web page results which are linked is order of relevance, from most relevant to least relevant, in accordance to the keywords you have entered. Obviously, having a having ranking in these results pages will increase your website’s overall web visibility, whilst a lower ranking will decrease its visibility.

If you want to increase your web visibility in SERPs, you need search engine optimisation. For more information about search engine optimisation, take a look at some of the following blog posts.

• SEO Tips
• Ideal Keyword Density
• Social Networking and SEO

Alternatively, you can view all our search engine optimisation articles, read about the SEO services we provide, or simply contact us directly.

Google is highly likely to be shutting down Google Search in China, after discussions with Chinese authorities regarding censorship laws appear to have reached an impasse.

Last Friday, the Chinese government challenged Google directly, stating that it refused to compromise its censorship laws to prevent Google from leaving China. Google’s removal of censorship occurred after a number of ‘cyber-attacks’ has occurred to Google’s systems from an apparent Chinese origin.

Li Yizhong, the Chinese minister for industry and information technology, has this to say on the topic:

“If [Google] takes steps that violate Chinese laws, that would be unfriendly, that would be irresponsible, and they would have to bear the consequences.”

“[Google] has taken 30 per cent of the Chinese search market.”

“If you don’t leave, China will welcome that, if you don’t leave, it will be beneficial for the development of the Internet in China.”

I previously posted about Google’s new web design, and now the BBC website is undergoing a beta web design. Take a look at the new BBC web design in the screenshot below.

Click the image above to view an enlarged screenshot. Alternatively, you can take a look at the beta BBC directly at http://beta.bbc.co.uk/

The new BBC homepage design is even heavier in JavaScript and AJAX functionality allowing for some extremely dynamic customisation of the page to any individual user’s personal preferences.

Google has recently released quite a tweak to its google.com web design to a select few users. Below are a couple of screenshots of the new web design from Google. Clicking the screen shots below will show the new web design, which features more squared off search button, a highlighted sidebar on search results and a change in default link colour to a significantly lighter shade of blue.

This also appears to be a slight re-brand of the Google logo as well. The Google logo in these screen shots are noticeably less bevelled than the current logo and is without the drop shadow on the existing logo.

Google Experimental New Logo Design – March 2010

New Google Web Design – Search Engine Results Page – March 2010

About Keyword Density

In the context of search engine optimisation, keyword density refers to amount of times a certain keyword or phrase appears in web page content relative to the total number of words present within the content being analysed. The keyword density is usually shown as a percentage indicating the number of times the keyword or phrase, in comparison to the total number of words, but can also be expressed as a ratio of the same data.

Significance of Keywords for SEO Purposes

Keyword density was first introduced as a search engine optimisation tool in the early 1990s when, at the time, keyword density was one of the major, and in some cases, only factor contributing to the way search engines ranked their results. Currently keyword density is still of great importance to search engine optimisation, but is no longer the sole factor in increasing ranking. Other important factors include good site structure, unique, high-quality and regular content updates and strong, numerous and consistent back links.

The Ideal Keyword Density

Most search engine optimisation experts recommend a value of between 1 and 3 percent keyword density for any particular targeted keyword or key phrase. This value can vary dependant on the nature or format of the content, and also can depend highly upon the subject matter of the content itself.However, it is important not to over use the technique of putting keywords into content, as this results in a very high keyword density and is known as ‘keyword stuffing’.

Although keyword stuffing may produce high rankings for a brief time on highly unique content, it is likely to be diminished very quickly, and is not a recommended strategy for search engine optimisation. Due to keyword stuffing being a technique for writing for search engines, rather than for humans, this breaches Google’s web master guidelines and thus could, in a worse case scenario, result in a indexing ban from Google and/or other search engine.

Keyword Density Advice

If you want advice on keyword density or any other aspect of search engine optimisation, feel free to contact us. Also, please ask us about how we can search engine optimise your website and what the best strategy for your unique niche might be.