Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web search
Straight from the horses mouth – Matt Cutt’s from Google talks about keywords in the meta tag.
What is Google Wave?
Google Wave is tipped to be the “next generation” of Internet communication and was first announced by Google in May this year. The name was inspired by the Firefly television series in which a Wave is an electronic communication (often consisting of a video call or video message). Google Wave will be launched to a select group of people at the end of this month and soon after that to the internet population.
In traditional email, you send a message to one or more recipients which consists of a message and possibly attached. The recipient can then reply to the sender or reply to all. Google’s Gmail, built on this with the threading of conversations, so replies to emails are joined together in one thread. This can be confusing at first but is really useful once you get the hang of it.
Google Wave is the next innovation on this. Instead of having of a message (eg email) as a standalone piece of information you have a Wave which is an entire conversation containing many forms of media between 2 or more people.
Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. You see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content — it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use “playback” to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.
So that makes it an email, document, forum, wiki, chat, video library, image library, podcast, social network and collabation system all in one.
An example of google wave
Terminology that is currently used is;
Wave is a group of wavelets, consisting of one or more participants. A wave is a living thing, with participants communicating and modifying the wave in real time.
Wavelet is a part of wave, a threaded conversation that is spawned from a wave (including the initial conversation). Wavelets serve as the container for one or more messages, known as blips. The wavelet is the basic unit of access control for data in the wave. All participants on a wavelet have full read/write access to all of the content within the wavelet.
During the lifetime of a wave, you may spawn private conversations, which become separate wavelets, but are bundled together within the same “wave.” Since events occur at the wavelet level or below, the context of an event is restricted to a single wavelet.
Blip is the basic unit of conversation and consists of a single messages which appears on a wavelet. Blips may either be drafts or published (by clicking “Done” within the Wave client).
Below is the 1hr20min video of the announcement of Google Wave in May this year.
What is the best thing you can do for your website
So you've got a website, what next. What can you do now to get it working for you and working for your business?
- Email Marketing – a simple, regular, valuable email message to your database can have incredible increase on your enquiries and sales.
- Google Adwords / Facebook Advertising – Target Google or Facebook ads can get in front of new prospects immediately and provide instant traffic and enquiries. It's under your control, scalable and measurable.
- SEO – Survey your best clients and find out what words they would use if they were looking for your products & services. Optimise your website in search engines for these words.
- Social Networking – Interact with communities such as Twitter, Stumble Upon, Facebook, and LinkedIn to form relationships with your target market and drive them to your site.
- Design – what is the perception that your website is creating. Does it match the brand that you have or that you are trying to convey? How people perceive your business is their reality.
- Outsource – if you don't have the skills or the time to do it yourself, let a professional help you. It will be well worth the investment and you can spend your time doing what you do best.
- People – brand individuals by using blogs, twitter and articles. People like to do business with people more than companies.
- Quality – people seek consistency and quality. Make sure your website is error free, easy to navigate around, generally helpful and everything the user expects. Test, Test then Test again.
Top 8 Tips for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Here are some of the simple things you can do to ensure that your website is optimised to be easily found in search engines such as Google
1. Title Tag
The title tag appears in the top left bar of your browser.The number one factor in ranking a page on search engines is the title tag. Make sure the key words that you want to found for are in your title tag. These can usually be set in your content management system (CMS) or are part of the heading meta tags in the code of your webpage.
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
Anchor text is the text that appears underlined and in usually in blue for a link from one webpage to another. Inbound links are links from other peoples website. You should try and get as many websites that have a similar subject as yours to link to your website, with your key words in the anchor text.
3. Global Link Popularity of Site (PageRank)
How many pages are linking to your page is called link popularity, or in Google, PageRank.
The more sites link to you, the better. Quality content is the most important factor to getting bound links. Try adding a new page of content or update content every couple of days. The only way to perform well in SEO now is to have a rich content site.
4. Age of Site
When was the domain of the site registered? Nothing you can do about this, but there is evidence that suggests that how long you have your domain registered for makes a difference (spam sites are not registered for long). If you are thinking about building a new website register your domain name now. Put a one page website with content rich in keywords on it and have at least one link to it from another site that is already listed in Google. While you are planning and building your site Google will the one page and at least the ball is rolling.
5. Link Popularity within the Site
This is the number of links to the page from inside your own domain.
Because of #2, it's critical that you link to pages from within your site using the right anchor text. Make sure that you:
- Use the linked titles setting
- Make good used of the Most Read, Related Items and Latest News modules.
- Have a sitemap component linked to right from your homepage
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links and Popularity of Linking Site
It's important that you get quality inbound links. This means they have to be from a site that is topically related to your site, and one that has a high PageRank.
It's worth submitting once to directories.
Type “related:www.yoursite.com” into google and contact the top 20 returns for links. If possible, also have have a blog, and network with others in your area of interest. Make sure you frequently link to other blogs in your area of interest.
7. Keyword Use in Body Text
Optimise your page for what you actually write instead of writing for what you want to optimise.
It sounds backwards but makes more sense from a marketing point of view.
Write quality content that is valuable and captivating for your target maker. Then use the tool of your choice to find the keyword density of the page. (eg http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/)
Take the top three key phrases and add them to the meta keywords, title and description. Keywords in H1-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings. Using keywords in bold or strong tags – slight effect, same with img alt tags and filenames.
If you are not happy with the top three key phrases or they are generic terms. Edit and review the content with more of the keywords that reflect what the page is about.
8. Friendly URLs
The word is still out on whether Friendly URLs have a positive effect on Search Engine Optimisation, but they certainly don't hurt and increase the likely hood that you will have keywords in the anchor text for inbound links. A friendly URL is one that has a form like www.mysite.com.au/desiredkeyword.aspx instead of www.mysite.com.au/default.aspx?page=23&prodId=45
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Basics
When I'm giving talks on eMarketing, one of the most popular topics is Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, yet it is one of the most misunderstood areas of internet marketing. Whilst there are many techniques and strategies necessary to have your website show at number 1 for a given search, there are some simple basic things that you can do to get 90% of the results.
So who better to give us the basics than one of Google's senior team members, Matt Cutts.
Click here for a story from USA TODAY, complete with a video of Matt Cutts explaining SEO basics.
Google Android
Android is the first complete open and free mobile phone platform that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. It came out of the Open Handset Alliance, a group of 30 technology and mobile companies.
Android was built from the ground-up to enable developers to create compelling mobile applications that take full advantage of all a handset has to offer. It is built to be truly open. For example, an application could call upon any of the phone's core functionality such as making calls, sending text messages, or using the camera, allowing developers to create richer and more cohesive experiences for users.
As reported in Business Week, Google quietly aquired Android Inc. bringing to it a wealth of talent in mobile development.
So what's in it for Google?
Well, Google is not really a search engine company. It's an Advertising Booking Company that has created an enormous amount of advertising space by owning and running the worlds largest and most popular search engine. It has further increased the advertising space with Docs, Maps, iGoogle, Gmail, GTalk and News Alerts and clearly Mobiles is the next area to be conquered. With almost all new mobile devices being 3G enabled, mobile internet applications (and associated advertising) are going to be the big thing of the next couple of years. Supporting a platform that makes writing applications easy across many different handset brands possible is a strategic move to ensure that Google is able to own as much market share of the mobile internet as it does of the desktop and laptop internet.
Your website traffic
Do you know how much web site traffic your web site attracts and you wonder who's coming to your site? Where do they come from? When do they come? How did they come across to your site?
Your website host (or your website developer) should be able to give you fairly comprehensive statistics, but what should you look for.
The key metrics that will be of most use will be
- number of visitors (or sessions)
- number of unique visitors
- the referring websites
- the referring search engines
- keywords used in search engines
- most visited pages
- most downloaded files
If you don't have access to comprehensive stats or the stats package your host uses is a bit limited then you might like to consider Google Analytics.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you.
Google Analytics has all the features you'd expect from a high-end analytics offering. It also provides tightly integrated AdWords support, so you can view AdWords ROI metrics without having to import cost data or add keyword tracking codes.
Getting Results in Google
Rand Fishkin from SEOMOZ has just released a report that summarizes the opinions of 37 different SEO industry contributors on the different ranking factors for achieving success in Google. It’s a great reference document and well worth reviewing and keeping to hand.
One of our clients, Oz Kit Homes, used these principles to move their website from not being listed in the top 10 pages to being on page 1 for the search term ”kit homes”.
According to the study, the top 10 positive factors that effect Google rankings are:
And the top 5 negative factors that can be detrimental to your ranking efforts are:
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) the basics
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is becoming a very popular way to drive traffic to your website. But it can also be a valuable research tool. I don't think that it should replace good search engine optimisation but merely enhance it.
The most common form of SEM is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and the most commonly used PPC advertising is Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. These PPC Ads are the “sponsored links” you see in Google and the “sponsored results” you see in Yahoo. The nice thing about PPC is that you can control it and you can get instant results and feedback.
When you set up a PPC campaign, you choose what key words you want your ad to appear for and how much you are willing to pay per click. All the ads that are set to come up for that key word are ranked by cost per click, so the higher you set your cost, the higher your ad appears in the sponsored links. You then set a daily budget of your maximum total spend and once your budget is reached, your ads won't show until the next day when your budget is reset. You can also set geographical regions where your ad will be shown so you don't waste your marketing budgets on people outside of the areas where you do business.
For example you can set up a campaign for the key words “interactive marketing” with $0.15 per click and a budget of $20 per day to be shown only in Australia and within hours you can start tracking your results.
There are 2 valuable metrics that you get back from your campaign, impressions (the number of people who see your ad) and the number of people who click on your ad to get to your website. This gives a third valuable metric of a click through rate.
The overall aim is to drive as much targeted traffic to your website, by increasing the number of impressions and click through rate through the choice of good keywords, a well written and target ad and a significant cost per click to show your ad in one of the top places.
