“Amit Singhal, head of search at Google, talks to Leo Kelion at the company’s London headquarters

Last month Google announced the introduction of the Knowledge Graph in the US – an effort to improve its results by teaching its servers to understand what the words typed into its search boxes mean, and how they relate to other concepts.

It marks a big bet by the firm’s head of search, Amit Singhal, who discussed the move with the BBC.

We had already done a lot of wizardry to give you relevant text, images and video in one simple interface, but computers still didn’t understand that the Taj Mahal is a beautiful monument. Or it can be a Grammy-winning artist. Or it can even be casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. And depending on if you are feeling hungry, it could also be a neighbourhood restaurant.

Mr Singhal revamped Google’s search algorithm in 2001 and was put in charge of the feature

To human beings that’s just intuitive.

To computers it’s not, because of the following fundamental fact: computers are really good at representing strings of characters. They use Ascii and various other nomenclature to represent sequences of words and numbers, whereas human beings live in a world of things, not strings. ”Continue reading the main story

The question is how do SEO consultants use this information to improve the SEO rankings of their clients websites?

Steve was far more than a CEO he has inspired so many. How many people are genuinely moved by a death of a CEO? So many messages from the good, small and great about his death around the world.

This 2005 Stanford graduation speech is even more moving today than at the time.

He talks about three main themes:

•    Connecting the Dots
•    Getting kicked out of Apple
•    Death

The last one really resonates.

1.    Connecting the dots can be only done later, one has to have belief in yourself and gut to follow the unbeaten path, it is only later that one will be able to  connect the dots.
He did Calligraphy – at the time of no practical use, but he wanted to do it. However when he designed 10 years later the Mac he included beautiful fonts to make it look good.
2.    Getting kicked out of Apple. Believed that he had let entrepreneurs down. Rejected, but still in love with technology. In fact getting fired was one of the best things that happened to me, it freed me up from the heaviness of success. He refer to this as the most creative period of his life with  creation of Next and Pixar and meeting the love of his life.
Seeing the positives in everything is so powerful, even when kicked out of your job.
Keep looking, never settle. This message of continuous learning is so important.
3.    Death. When he was 17 I heard the quote “Live every day as if it were your last and then some day you’ll be right.” . I had to look up the original quote from H.H. “Breaker” Morant.
Practice it, if you have too many days are not, then change something. Knowing you are going to die is a great reason to do what you love. Refers to his getting Pancreatic cancer. Make sure that everything is up to date. It was a curable type of cancer. I have lived through “death”, no one wants to die, no one has ever escaped it.

Sometime you will die so don’t live someone else’s life. Have the courage to follow your heart.

The whole life catalogue, before electronics, the bible of his age, idealistic, the Google of his day. Stewart Brand put out the last one in middle 70s with the back page being an image of an early morning country road

“Stay hungry – stay foolish”

He always wished this on himself.

One can see that he lived this, he will be remembered.

I am not sad for him, I am sad and the world is sad.

Steve Jobs – Thanks and RIP.

It depends on many factors:

• How optimised the website is.
• How competitive are the keywords
• How old and established is the website

The most important thing to start with is optimise the website. We will review the keywords, the site structure and content and the competitor set. We will then agree the SEO campaign objectives.

The analysis of the competitors for keywords. Some top level keywords such as dentist may be very competitive, however “long keywords” such as London Dentist as easier (but still competitive), however Kensington Dentist or London white teeth is easier.

The backlinking campaign is a balance between acquiring a huge number of links rapidly to achieve the ranking quickly with Google considering this as unusual and placing the website in a “sandbox” where it might drop from Google or stay static. A site under 6 months of age or one that has not had links added for 6 months or more is susceptible to this.

A backlinking strategy for most sites will ramp up over time, for a new site this will be over three months. In the early period it is better to have lower number of high quality links with as much variety in types of backlinks as possible. The programme needs to follow Googles Webmaster Guidelines and appear natural.

Matt Cutts the SEO Guru in Google did this video that talks about “Is there such a thing as building too many links? ”

Facebook SSL Change 1st October

Potential clients are waking up to the impact of Facebook changes.

If the Fanpage does not have SSL potential clients will see a blank page or a security warning when they visit your Fan Page.

On October 1^st, Facebook is forcing all Pages to use https – the secure browsing protocol. If your Fan Page does not have an SSL certificate enabled, you are going to be invisible, possibly lose existing fans and rapidly see your Social Marketing take a nosedive.

The solution is to have a SSL certificate. The easiest way is to use us!

If you contact your webhost they will give you the options.

The cheapest route is to use their shared certificates if they have one.

If not you may need to purchase a private SSL certificate.

The easiest host for the chageover is Hostgator who have for many hosting accounts a free shared SSL certificate. Godaddy charges $50.

If your host is difficult or expensive you may be better moving to Hostgator.

When you have the SSL certificate you need to go into your facebook application and add this new secure https URL.

If your fanpage is  wordpress hosted you need to go and change the web address to the https URL.

Hope this helps.

Please let me know if I can help.

OPTION

We will Set Up, Update or Transfer your Fanpage and host it on a SSL Account for £300.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/backupwordpress/

whilst this is free and easy doing the back up, the reinstallation takes a bit of time and expertise. 1st4SEO use the following software, however it involves a one off charge of around £42 ($67)
b.    Flip Me Clone – Affiliate Link

We use this product as it is far easier and quicker to use.

• Backup your entire WordPress install
• Installs WordPress for You!
• Clones all of your WordPress Settings, Plugins, Posts, Pages, Themes, Widgets…EVERYTHING!
• Restores your Site Configurations to precisely what they were
• Clone your site on another domain without having to create a new database

It costs $67 (~£42)

http://www.digiresults.com

2.    Update WordPress and Plugins
Every time you post, or every month update your WordPress and plugins. This is crucial as the majority of hacks are via older versions of WordPress or its plug ins.
3.    Remove Admin from your WordPress blog and Database.
As admin is a  is a common way that hackers have broken into websites. Hackers often try this route. Many people leave the original set up of “Admin”.  Of these 4 key steps it is the most technically involved, but follow these instructions and you should not have a problem. Of course make sure you have an uptodate  backup.
Change the password. Use a random password generator to create a strong password or construct one with numbers and characters, not your sons name or password123! Google random password generator or use this one.
http://www.random.org/passwords/

If you have “Admin” as a user do the following to it. You will have to edit the name from your SQL database.

a. First of all from WordPress admin panel, add a new administrator with a strong password.

b. Finding your “Database name” and removing your “WordPress username”. Delete Admin from the admin panel so that articles are transferred to another user.

So that you can remove the name of your sites database, Go to find the database name that your site runs off we need to do the following:

1. Login to your hosting providers Cpanel
2. Click the folder named file manager,
3. Select the wordpress site your are going to change
•    Scroll to file labelled “wp-config.php”
•    Now just right click on the file and select “View” to view the .php document inside.

You will see something like:

—————————————————————————————-

// ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘Admin’);

/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘Admin’);

/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘XXXXXX’);

—————————————————————————————–

You need to change the DB_NAME and DB_USER if you have admin rights

Changing Your Sites Username and Password

The next steps I will show you will take you through changing your username from “admin” to a more secure password that you can remember easily. To do this log into your hosting account and browse to “databases”

Now click on the icon labelled “phpMyAdmin”

You will now be able to see your database in the left hand column of the screen.

Sselect and click your database name that you identified above, then navigate to the folder labelled “wp_users” and click on it.

You can see that under wp_users there is “user_login if you haven’t made any changes one of your usernames will read “admin”. So to stop the hacker from easily hacking in and prevent them from altering your site any further you need to delete it.

4.    Wordpress Security Plugins

a.    Install Login Lockdown (if not already installed)
This is a simple but effective plug-in.
Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every
failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts
are detected within a short period of time from the same IP
range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from
that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.
Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block
after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be
modified via the Options panel. Admisitrators can release locked
out IP ranges manually from the panel.

b.    Install WordPress Firewall 2  (if not already installed)
This WordPress plug-in investigates web requests with simple
WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious
attacks. There exist a few powerful generic modules that do this;
but they’re not always installed on web servers, and difficult to
configure.
It intelligently whitelists and blacklists pathological-looking
phrases based on which field they appear within in a page request
(unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment
bodies, etc.). Its purpose is not to replace prompt and responsible
upgrading, but rather to mitigate 0-day attacks and let bloggers sleep better at night.

c.    Install Secure WordPress (if not already installed)
Secure WordPress beefs up the security of your WordPress
installation by removing error information on login pages, adds
index.html to plug-in directories, hides the WordPress version and
much more.
1.Removes error-information on login-page
2.Adds index.php plugin-directory (virtual)
3.Removes the wp-version, except in admin-area
4.Removes Really Simple Discovery
5.Removes Windows Live Writer
6.Removes core update information for non-admins
7.Removes plugin-update information for non-admins
8.Removes theme-update information for non-admins (only WP
2.8 and higher)
9.Hides wp-version in backend-dashboard for non-admins
10.Removes version on URLs from scripts and stylesheets only
on frontend
11.Blocks any bad queries that could be harmful to your WordPress website.

The above plugin removes WP version numbers.
Many hacks today are caused by WordPress version numbers. Sites
are easily hacked because WordPress version numbers are publicly
accessible by doing a simple search on Google. All a hacker would
need to do is run a search for the WordPress version number and
be able to find a hack for that particular version.
The easiest thing for you to do to prevent hackers accessing your
site this way is to remove you WordPress version number

I hope this helps. If you want further levels of security or to recover from hacking go to WordPress Security.

If you have any questions please contact us.

Have a good day.