Google New Products in 2011 - Inside Search

Google has launched three new features in recent event at San Francisco on June 14^th 2011. Following are three new features. This event is officially named as “Google InsideSearch”. 

1. Voice Search
2. Instant Pages
3. Search by Image

1. Voice Search:

Google has announced voice Search for desktop computers. At present Google users are typing keywords to get the relevant information on search results. Now users can speak words so that Google will understand the word and display relevant search results. According to the survey, Google is able to recognize 80% of the words and displaying relevant results.

2. Instant Pages:

This is another great feature which will improve the visitor usability a lot. Usually 40% of the Google visitors will click on the 1^st link, so it will take little time to load respective site and visitors have to wait. With new feature “Instant Pages”, visitor will able to see the site instantly. Reason behind this is technique is Google will load it already in the backend and displays it instantly when user clicks it.

3. Search by Image:

Initially people used to search images by name and getting relevant images. Search engines inserted few other features for user convenience.  One feature i.e. “Search similar images” that we always use this feature to find out the right image with desired quality and size. Now Google went a step forward and made an awesome feature live. Visitors can drop image file on Google search bar, so that it will display all similar images with different resolutions and sizes.  This feature would be helpful in finding out your personal images at other public places posted by someone else.

Basic Features for SEO

Behind the scenes, there are a lot of components that keep a website up and running. It’s possible, and maybe even practical (depending on your business situation), to launch and run your website without many features enabled. Doing so will give you a functioning website, but it won’t give you an optimal one. Here are just a few examples of features you should be using on your site for SEO:

XML Sitemap: Take a look at any well-optimized site, and you won’t have to look far to find a sitemap. It’s one of the most basic features you can add to your site for optimization. The sitemap let’s search engine bots crawl your site more easily by providing a list of available URLs. Making your site easier to index helps it rank better. If you run a large website that updates frequently, you will want to make sure that your CMS is set to automatically update the sitemap when new content is posted.

Robots.txt: You’ll want a robots.txt file for identical reasons as the XML sitemap – to help crawlers do their job more efficiently. Google places a limit on the number of pages it will scan for your site. This can be problematic if you are running a large site – Google will never look at some of your pages. Furthermore, you can not tell Google which pages to index. You can, however, tell them which pages to ignore by using a robots.txt file. This increases the chances that Google will index only the important pages of your site.

Google Analytics: Although not necessary for the operation of your site, a Google Analytics account is necessary from a marketing perspective. If you want to manage your growth and impact on the Internet, or the success of a campaign – the best way is through analytics. Furthermore, the sooner you set up an account, the sooner you can begin collecting data to refer back to when running future campaigns.

Search Engineering at Google

I’m always a fan of Googlers doing more communication and more videos, so when some fellow search quality folks made a video about working at Google, I said I’d be happy to post it:

You can find out more info and apply to be a search engineer at Google if you’re interested.

8 SEO Tips in a Panda World

In this Panda world I’ve been taking courses and doing some serious research and study on how to get/keep top Google rankings.

SEO has changed a lot, although some things never change – good onsite optimization means you don’t have to worry about every little update – your site will be solid.

The Panda update did make everyone step up their game, though, especially in Google Places and link building. I spent 2 solid months researching, studying and revising my SEO methods to conform to the Panda world.

Here are my Top SEO Tips after Panda

Onsite SEO

1. Increase the content of your pages and posts. At least 500 words, and 700 if possible. Make sure you use good grammar and check your spelling. Points off if you don’t do a good job there, just like in English class.
2. If you don’t have videos on your site, add them. You can get videos from YouTube about anything at all. Better yet, make your own. You can do that easily by converting a PowerPoint into a video. The one on this page was put together very quickly using these instructions. It’s not the best but I wanted to show you what you can do using free products.
3. If your business is local, create and upload locations.kml  and geositemap.xml files to your root folder. Here’s a handy dandy geositemap generator. It also explains what to do once they’re created.

Google Places SEO

1. If you have a local business then you need to get busy if you expect to compete. I seriously suggest having an SEO specialist do this for you. There are many details within a Google Places listing that can help you rank well, or kill your listing. On top of that, what worked before doesn’t work now.
2. Make certain you hire someone who is experienced and can show proof of ranking businesses…there are a lot of people who claim to be SEO experts but are not. Don’t waste your money or worse, your chance to be competitive.

Link Building

1. Article marketing is still good, but make certain your content is valuable and not just rehashed crap. Also, longer is better. Ezine requires 400 and sometimes 600 words in an article. I suggest at least 700 if possible.
2. Videos videos videos. Google loves them. You don’t have to show your face in them either, so if that part bothers you like it did me, just provide information.
3. Social media is becoming ever more important. You need to have the following for your business: Facebook, Twitter, Linked In. Blog posts or articles should go to FB and Linked In, as well as Tweeted. There are tools you can use to automate this.

Google is asking us to provide more quality information in a variety of communication methods. This actually should not be too hard if your website is a business, because there are always plenty of things to talk about, explain, announce, demonstrate, and offer. Think of who, what, when, where and why.

If you’re an IM’er you have to provide more content and be smarter about your back linking. You need a plan; just winging it won’t get you far at all.

It’s time to take Internet marketing seriously. Local businesses need to cancel their yellow pages ads and put that money into their websites and online marketing efforts. The competition already has.