Here is an insight of server issues and ways to fix it up.

Your Website might be very search engine friendly and yet it was not crawled, indexed and not shown in the search results? What do you do?

You feel you might have improperly coded the robots.txt file or it was the poor navigation or your domain got banned. None of this happened. And what if your website did not had a robots.txt file.

You will even check your domain in the whois.webhosting.info. And here if you find improper information, it means it is a server/hosting problem. For this you need to check if the DNS information is properly configured. This can be one of the many lead causes which will affect the search engine ranking of your website. IP configuration can also harm your search engine ranking and lead to indexing problems. You need to check DNS setting is properly configured and the site revolves around a specific IP. It is also advisable that if you can check what other websites are present with the same domain as yours on the same IP. This could prevent from indexing problems of search engine.

Improperly configured servers cause problems with the site. Though a very rare issue of occurrence, it does happen. If the web owner mistypes the domain of his website or if it is attached to the wrong IP, it leads the website to bigger issues. The web server must be configured to accept all the requests for a domain to check out if it needs www or not. Additionally the hosted website should revolve around the IP address. This way even if a user wants to connect to the specific site through the IP address, he should be lead to the site and not receive a “page cannot be displayed” or “page not found” error.

Improperly configured servers or overloaded servers can bring harm to search engine indexing and ranking. Sometimes when you perform WHOIS lookup, you will see that several hundreds of websites on the same server, even if its not a common issue, you can still run into problems with ranking in the search engine results.

It mainly happens because if your website and a porn website are on the same IP, by default your website will be associated with that and your site is surely going to loose in the competition. While search engines are quite smart at identifying these types of errors, some other issues may still rise. So it’s better to take precautions from the initial stage.

The best thing is to request your server to move your website into a new IP so that it will not get penalized.

The best way to identify these issues is to become an Internet detective and perform some little research on the PING commands and WHOIS servers to test your website to make sure it resolves properly to a specific IP.

Many times when you are ensured about the problem not being with the site itself, then it is likely to be the server issue.

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Like many users who search online, I use the google search engine. About 50% of the searches in the United States are done using Google. But If google doesn’t produce results of my relevance, I turn to Yahoo search engine that is second in popularity or the next, MSN, a consistent 3rd.

No matter whichever search engine is your favorite, take time off to explore all its features. I felt Google was simple in offering such a neutral home page. But, have a look at Yahoo and MSN too. Google has no news, weather nor financial information: assuming the people to know the links on its home page. Yahoo and MSN are easier to search for news and information than Google.

Once while searching on Google search engine, I clicked on the news link and was amazed to see new pages of Yahoo and MSN. A click on tools, Internet options and ‘Use current’ in the home page area made Google’s news page my new home page. I search right down the page to check for news, weather and sports.

A home page is the start page on a browser. You can change the features easily. Click on tools on the browser toolbar, choose options, and make the changes for your home page.

One often overlooks the features available on most search engines that are particularly specialized. Most users just keyboard in their search terms and do a general search on the Internet. Specialized searches give productive results, if you’re looking for just news, images, video or sports.

Yahoo’s ’select search category’, & MSN’s ’select a category’ are where you will search for specific categories. If you want to search only in these categories, keyboard in the keywords, and then click on the specific link.

Google simply lists the links; assuming that users know these categories are for specific search. In my search in Google, I once just discovered the Google link ‘Froogle’ opens a wonderful shopping search, which includes many obscure mail order categories.

Google’s link for ‘groups’ indeed allows searches of the Usenet, a worldwide discussion system that includes newsgroups, the forums for discussing wide variety of topics. Anyone can read the content and post their comments.

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This article is most useful to the ones who are familiar with CSS and XHTML. You need not be an expert to understand the concepts, but I would like to provide you the concept that will lead you to the advanced design in simpler ways for easier understanding. Like many designers and programmers I began laying out my web pages using all the world of graphics and discovered the tables and its wonders without being aware of. Since the advanced versions of browsers are more compatible for CSS programming and tables cause the trouble, you would benefit if you were a CSS programmer having been an SEO.

The quality content should always be your highest priority and not SEO tricks. This suggestion or advice given to you would surely bring out the fruits of your hard work or rather research because SEO’s main tool should always be the design of the web page and the content. But then, it also requires the understanding of search engines crawling your web site.

Most Search engines use the ‘top down’ approach to crawl the web pages. They look at your code, which the users are generally unfamiliar of. Search engine robots do not a thing as humans do, but they are very logically programmed and are completely predictable once you understand them.

Most times, you would have come across the searches that provide complete obscure data instead of your relevance for the keyword you have typed. How CSS works in a top down approach of search engine is the biggest question?
The mind of a search engine determines your web page by checking if the content is placed in the top of the page. You start with certain words, which are repeated through, out the content that also act as the closing of content. This helps out in knowing what your page is in the automated brains of search engines.

Your well-trained eyeballs will probably look for a title, and then read the content. So, the page can be said to be done in top-down logic. You read the HTML page by top-down logic and get surprised to scroll down to get to the original content and how much the “other content” a search engine will see first. And if you use table format for better layout, the top-down logic of your source code looks like it had the legs cutoff and the place settings on the floor. But, Using CSS, you can organize the code such that the search engines will see your original content first regardless of where it appears on the page.

Using CSS, you can build search engine friendly pages. These pages will can also be uploaded faster as complex table format layouts take longer time than a CSS layout, which is another benefit for SEO.

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A new Instant search feature can be offered from Yahoo. Type any word and Instant search will answer your queries in a “speech bubble” down below the search box instantly.

Say, you wanted to search for wikipedia, Yahoo will instantly recognize that’s a popular query, where only one listing will be chosen. Speech bubble directly takes you right to the page you wanted, without actually generating even a single results page.

Yahoo’s Instant search does a similar thing like Google” trademark I’m Feeling Lucky except that it only gives you the preview of your destination.

In some cases, Yahoo’s Instant search will take you directly to a shortcut or the relevant answer. Take an example that you are searching for weather San Francisco in Yahoo. Yahoo here will take you directly to the shortcuts result page, where the weather forecast will be shown right within the results and one doesn’t even need to click to reach it.

In addition, if you type in a URL, Instant search is expected to turn that into a link to take you to enter the page. Spell a word incorrectly and an instantaneous correction should appear with the link to get the result for the corrected word.

So you searchers want to try this feature? Yahoo got its own funky area for this kind of experiments-Yahoonext. You can also expect to find it in the new Instant search area. In either places, once you search and see the Instant search speech bubble answer up. This feature is not available on Yahoo’s home page.

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America Online may replace the world’s no.1 search engine i.e.Google with a rival product from Microsoft. Microsoft is also considering for a broader agreement with America Online, a unit of Time Warner’s company said a spokesperson but declined to say how large the expected investment might be.

While Google had a control of 56% of global search queries in June, Yahoo and Microsoft had 22% & 11% respectively. So this deal would allow Microsoft, the biggest software company, to hike up its position in the search market and regain its Internet business.

Danny Sullivan, the editor of searchenginewatch.com says
“Despite having all the stuff, Microsoft had not really budgeted their share of search”.

From the time AOL acquired the Time Warner incl., the shares have fallen down to 61% in January 2001. More than $100 billion was lost after the Internet bubble blast in 2002.

Michael Mayzel, a Google spokesman said” AOL and Google have always had a healthy relationship” but he declined to comment further.

Instant Message was another matter both AOL and Microsoft shared their views on. Both the companies talked about making the instant messaging more compatible and selling online ads jointly.

Florida-based Richard Steinberg, president of Boca Raton, who owned 38,000 of shares, said, ”Time Warner’s incl. is not a technology company, it’s a content company”.

Google powers the AOL’s web search engine technology and sells the Ads that come by the side of the search results. Both the companies had an agreement in May 2002. The online ads and other fees generated by AOL accounted 11% of Google’s revenue ended this June 30th.

Efforts of Parson

AOL having lost 6 million subscribers since 2002,this year added a free website that has videos, news and a search engine powered by Google. This free service
Marked a key component in a plan of Parsons and AOL Chief Executive Jonathon Miller to increase the sales as the subscription fees fell.

Parsons wrote in an email said, ”We are carefully processing and reviewing a range of options to increase the company’s shares”.

In the three years leading with Time Warner, Parsons has reduced the net debt to $13 million having sold the music unit and returned profits to AOL, settling the Exchange commission probe and securities.

Presently Parsons is planning a $5 billion share buyback for more than 2 years and also intends to sell 16% of the cable net in the first public offering that will take place next year after closing its purchase with Adelphia Comm. corp. assets.

In 2004 the Internet accounted 21% of sales and 18% of operating profit for Time Warner incl. AOL gained a 45% increase for its ad sales in the second quarter, compensating a 9% decline in the revenue from subscription.

AOL’s sales fell little short of 4% from expected $2.1 billion and the unit ended the period with 20.8 million customers in the second quarter. Time Warner incl. had a net loss of $321 million after setting out $ 3 billion for AOL-related claims. Sales fell 1.1% short of $10.7 billion.

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An increased number of search engines, advancements of techniques and technologies are making the SEM the tool industries can look forward to. In fact, Customers believe SEM is the ideal tool for their Ad campaigns.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are the major search engines followed with AOL, Ask Jeeves and AltaVista. The others are quite small, which are location-specified and market-specified who compete in their own locations. While MSN and Google have become the homes for most of the online purchasing, a study revealed that Google searches for more refined search terms, simpler search terms occur for Yahoo, MSN and AOL.

SEM in today’s world is not another illusion that occurred in the Internet accidentally. It is very much user driven and people, anywhere, need to look somewhere for their information. Is anyone aware of China’s own search engine? Very few. It is the 6th most visited Internet site that has been around for 5 years now, thankful to the Internet market’s fast growth in China which has now got more than 100 million surfers through out the world. Baidu had gone through a public offering recently and the share price went up from $27 to $140 in a day.
Well, Google too reported its quarterly revenues of $1.5 billion and excluding the payments to the other websites, rised to $900 million, 110% increase from the previous year and the expected amount of $842.

Research conducted by the US Online Marketing Forecast revealed a 33% increase in the SEM arena by 2005 end. Forecast also predicts that it will be a big increase of $11.6 billion by the year of 2010. The forecast revealed that while SEM is sure to become more effective in the coming years, the biggest obstacle could be the lack of Internet Marketing expertise. Nevertheless, SEM firms are welcoming this brand new advertising branch and their customers are obtaining the benefits.

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Recent research study reveals on average one of every three marketers of search engine say that the efforts put up for Ad campaigns are not fruitful than Optimization. Nearly 20% say they don’t measure up on return of investment.

Out of the 138 respondents who took part in the research, 35%
Reported optimization led to superior ROI. 9% reported there was no change in the results. 11% pointed out on paid search results.

The survey showed up that 21% of respondents didn’t measure the value of ROI.
The distinguishing thing in the survey was 10% could not measure ROI value and 14% did not know the difference between ROI for Ads and optimization

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