As a webmaster, you undoubtedly use Google’s web services. If not, then I recommend you do so immediately.

To improve efficiency of your Google app usage, try using Google.mE.

This freeware program will sync all of your online Google apps.

——————–

The best way to learn SEO tactics is to research other websites. You can find certain practices you would have never thought to use.

To help with this process, try out SEO Explorer.

This app acts as any other kind of browser; only it has analytical features that can help with your research.

Google Personalised Search

From around the beginning of December, Google will start tailoring your search results based on previous browsing history, whether you are logged into your Google account or not(This review assumes that you are logged out). In order to allay privacy concerns you can opt out if you wish but most people using Google will be using personalised search by default. Google accomplishes this finding your favored sites (indicated by which ones you most often click through to) and ranking sites from that brand or theme higher in your particular search results. This means Dymocks might be top of the SER’s for the keyword ‘books’ while for another person the same search will yield Angus & Robertson as the top positioned site. This doesn’t mean the other ranking factors are simply ignored however; they are simply used in conjunction with the personalised result factors. With this version of personalised search ( signed out of Google account), Google can only guess at your preference from what you click on, clicks are what your personalised search is based on, not search history or surfing habits.

Now you may think this has doom and gloom implications for search engine optimisation, well it doesn’t, not yet anyway. First, Google is going to have to collect huge amounts of click data in order to understand and use your preferences within the SERPS. Good structured pages with terrific content, correctly used HTML attributes and links will still play the majority role in the ranking of sites, whether personalised search takes effect or not. We’re not sure how much weighting the personalised search factor will have within the entire Google algorithm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people get near identical SERPS, regardless of their click history and habits. I have a feeling they may use the old Google 80/20 rule when implementing personalised search, i.e. 8 ‘normal results’ and 2 results impacted on by personalised search for each SERP.

Google’s New Search Page

Now unlike some of the other tweaks and updates that Google has implemented over the past month or so this is pretty much a purely aesthetic change. When the search page is first loaded, you only see the logo, search box and the search buttons. When you move your mouse the rest of the search page ‘fades in’. This is something that Google has been testing for a while, for example it only worked on Chrome for a while and then periodically for other browsers. The only reason I can think of for this change is to funnel more people to start searching right away, rather than exploring the other links on the page.

Google Real-Time results

Google also announced that Google Real Time search has been rolled out. This feature is going to be rolled out in an incremental process over the next few weeks. Essentially Google is going to start indexing tweets, Facebook status updates (where made publicly visible by the Facebook user and this feature will be rolled out at a later stage) and other forms of real-time information. According to Google, they are processing over ‘a billion documents a day’ from the real-time web. In order to activate this feature you need to click on the show options link just above the results. This opens a whole heap of options, in order to activate the Google real-time results click on latest link. Then just sit back and watch new results blend into the top of your SERPS.

Now with the advent of Twitter, ‘real-time’ seems to be all the rage, with everybody wanting instant gratification. I think the problem Google and the other search engines may be at the juxtaposition of real-time and relevancy. How do you rank a tweet in terms of relevancy to the subject? Is something that is ‘real-time’ better than something that is more relevant? Well, I don’t have answers to these questions but with a couple thousand PHD’s just sitting around thinking up answers to these questions I’m sure the big G has it covered. The following sources of real-time information will be indexed:

· Facebook

· MySpace

· FriendFeed

· Jaiku

· Identi.ca

· Twitter

· Fresh press releases or blog posts

Was this feature an absolute necessity for Google to survive? No, but it’s a ‘nice to have’ feature, as for me, it’s easier to keep up with my UEFA champions league scores.

Google Mobile Updates

Google announced a whole raft of search capabilities for mobile phones (and in particular android enabled phones). In terms of Google Voice search, Japanese, Mandarin and English are all now supported as well as several more phone models, including; Blackberries, Android powered mobiles and Nokia’s.

Search By location is a really interesting feature. According to the Google announcement, people with Google Maps on Android 1.6+ devices, can just press on the map for an extended period and ten of the closest points of interest (restaurants, shops etc) will be revealed to you. Nice feature, especially if you are bored and stuck somewhere for an extended period.

Google Goggles

Now this is a feature that really interests me, If Google can pull it off correctly it is going to be massive! This feature is currently a labs product that only users of Android 1.6+ devices can use. Essentially, you take a picture of an object, send it to Google and if they are able to recognise the object it returns relevant search results regarding the object. According to Google, Goggles will recognise the following objects:

· Books

· DVDs

· Landmarks

· Logos

· Artwork

· Businesses

· Products

· Barcodes

Google has also released the following tips for making Goggles work better:

* Take photos in areas with good lighting.
* Zoom in as much as possible.
* Use your phone in “left landscape” orientation (with your right thumb pressing the shutter).
* Hold your hands steady, and use the on-screen shutter button.

Imagine the capabilities, you are in a foreign country, you are doing the touristy/sightseeing thing, you want more information on an odd relic you are perusing so you take a picture and voila, all the information right on your mobile, very cool.

There are some other features like Google living stories, news rendered in a new and dynamic way. Updates to the Google Web Kit, including ways to speed up web apps. Loading time/web site performance is slated to be a big indicator in terms of search results in 2010. Martin has written a great post on Google and speed. As a result of the speed factor, Google has added another tool in Google Webmaster Tools where you can check the performance of your site. Google has also announced that extensions for Chrome are also now available. Wow, Google has been busy and I for one am looking forward to playing around with these news features and figuring out how they benefit me and the SEO I perform.

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.

Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.

Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your peril!

1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture

Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.

Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

In addition, all content contained in a specific category should be cross-linked via some sort of sub-navigation within that section.

2. Categorization and Avoiding Duplicate Content

When people are seeking information from a search engine, they usually have a question, a problem, or a need for specific information. The search queries they use at Google and the other engines reflect this. The more ways you can categorize your content for the various target markets you serve, the better.

Recommendation: Be sure that all top-level pages answer the potential searcher’s (your potential customers’) questions, and that it’s clear that your products and services can solve their problem. In addition, you also have to ensure that regardless of how someone found any piece of content on your site, they always end up at the same URL to avoid PageRank splitting and duplicate content issues.

For example, if a specific product can be classified as both a product and a service, it makes sense that it might be listed under both categories. However, the page (URL) that the potential customer eventually lands on, regardless of which category they started in, should always be the same.

3. New Content Management System and Changing URLS

If URLs must change in the redesign due to a new content management system or back-end coding, search engines may take some time to index the new URLs as well as give them the same weighting they gave the previous URLs due to URL age factors.

Recommendation: It’s critical to 301-redirect all old URLs to their relative counterpart within the newly designed website. This will pass the link popularity of the old URLs to the new ones quickly, as well as ensure that site visitors don’t receive 404-not-found errors.

This will be easier if the new URL naming is similar to the old one, because you can use automated methods. If URLs must change completely with no correlation to the names of the old URLs, and hand-redirects are required, you’ll want to at least redirect all the top-level pages, as well as those that you’re sure receive keyword traffic from search engines. But, ideally, every URL should be redirected if at all possible.

4. Coding of Navigation Menus

Links contained within the navigation of your website should be coded in a search engine–friendly manner so that they are visible and crawlable. Some DHTML and Flash menus are invisible to search engines, which causes the pages linked within them to not receive the internal link popularity they should receive.

Recommendation: Make sure all navigational menus are coded with CSS that is visible to search engines. In addition, avoid drop-down box links as the main form of navigation (CSS mouseovers are fine). You’ll also want to ensure that all content can be reached by hard-coded links – don’t force the user to go through any kind of search box menu because those are traditionally search engine unfriendly.

5. Custom HTML Elements

While some level of automation for titles, metas, headers, URLs, and alt attributes for images can be helpful, it’s critical that your new website’s content management system allow you to create custom descriptions for these as well.

Recommendation: Make sure the content management system has fields for custom title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, etc. There should be no limit to the number of characters allowed in these fields either, because every page may need a different number of words and characters.

6. Session IDs and Other Tracking Links

It’s best not to use session IDs to track visitors, but if your system must use them, you’ll only need to feed the “clean” URLs to the search engine spiders – otherwise, they may get caught in an infinite loop, indexing the same content under multiple URLs.

You’ll also want to avoid any sort of campaign tracking links appended to URLs because these can split your link popularity by causing your content to be indexed under multiple URLs.

Recommendation: If this type of tracking is inherent in your system, use the canonical link element to maintain one URL for every page of content.

Don’t be surprised if your developer isn’t happy to receive some of these “secrets.” He or she may feel that their authority is being usurped or their creativity is being hindered. Just remember that it’s your website that you’re paying them to create in a way that will make you the most money possible. Let your developer know up-front that these things are non-negotiable. If they tell you that they can’t do any of the above, start looking around for a new developer – ASAP!

While there will always be a few unexpected bugs to work out when your site goes live, you won’t have to be afraid of losing your search engine visitors as long as you know what you’re doing. We’ve successfully helped many companies through this transition without any glitches. At the end of the process, there’s nothing like the feeling of having your beautiful new website launched. But more than that, there’s great comfort in knowing that the people looking for what you provide will continue to be able to easily find you in the search engines.

Author
Jill Whalen

In order to succeed and combat the competitive online world, you need to maintain a good reputation online. A good reputation does not only require a good website design but a lot more to build confidence, to grow sales and ultimately leads to better revenues and higher profitability.

In today’s Internet buzz nasty rumors, wrong opinions and incorrect news spread rapidly and if not taken timely action to handle the news properly, you may face a serious threat to your online business and credibility.

Here are some simple measures you can take to maintain your website’s reputation:

1. Respond to customers

Being open and responsive to customers is an important part of creating a positive impression and managing your website’s reputation. If someone asks you a question, answer it there or through e-mail. Be quick in addressing your customer issues before the word spreads.

2. Answer the negative comments humbly

Be real, not everyone is satisfied with your work and services. If these people are among the ones spreading negative comments about you for whatever reason like delayed service or unfriendly attitude, answer them instantly to terminate the issue right there!

Be very polite when putting your point of view in front of such people and you’ll sure succeed in saving your reputation. Answering negative remarks modestly can be a great way of turning a bad situation into positive one.

3. Create official online profiles

Create your own platform for users to share their experiences they’ve had with you. Create your own profiles and websites complete with the kind of information you actually want to be available about you. Let users communicate with each other and comment about your products or services, whether positive or negative.

4. Report stolen material from you

It’s very well possible that online competitors may steal material from your website to increase their ranking and traffic. This may lose your credibility among your users, making you “not-so-unique” in their eyes. To control such theft, you can report their site through strict action.

5. Write blogs

Writing blog posts are extremely effective in promoting your business. Through blog reviews and blog comments, you even increase your chance of getting high traffic volumes to your website.

If you or any of the experts in your business have important knowledge like instructions, guidelines, tips and trick that can be useful for the users, share them through writing blog posts, let say you write blog for “basic tips for web design”. This will greatly enhance your online reputation.

6. Optimize For Search Engines

Majority of the internet users accept results from Google searches or any other search engine as highly credible. Therefore, to maintain a good website reputation, don’t forget to optimize your website. You can consult professional search engine optimization services for this purpose.

7. Using the social media

Setting up social media networks in order to maintain your website’s online reputation is a great thought. To begin with, set up your profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace. Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do the following things:

- Create a complete profile by putting all the information
- Engage and Interact with the members
- Monitor comments for both positive and negative remarks

You might have spend good time and money for your website design and building up your website’s good reputation, so it’s important not to let anyone drag it through the mud. Follow the above given tips to maintain your positive reputation among the online community.

Author: James Parker

Speculation in the search industry is rife this week with claims that Google Search Personalization has changed the SEO playing field. But has it really? Or are people freaking out for no good reason? To find out, we’ll look at how it impacts SEO in the negative and positive. But first, let’s have a quick refresher on how Personalized Search works.

What is Personalized Search?

For the past few years, Google has been monitoring what you search for when logged into your Google account and in particular, what sites you click on in the SERPs. If you favor particular sites, Google takes note and customizes future searches to show you more results featuring your favorite sites, more often and in higher positions.

For example, if you like t-shirt shopping online and are a regular visitor to Threadless as a result of logged in Google searches, Google would feature pages from Threadless more in the SERPs you see for t-shirt related search queries than would normally be featured in SERPs shown to others for the same search queries. Likewise, pages from Threadless would be pushed higher up the search results than they would normally be.

Personalized Search has been in place for signed-in users for years, but this month Google rolled out personalized search to users worldwide, whether they are signed into a Google account or not.

Apart from privacy concerns, the announcement has prompted the inevitable “SEO is dead” claims that always seem to surface whenever Google announces a change to their search functionality.

So let’s take a look at how/why personalization might influence search engine optimization.

Why Personalization DOES Impact SEO:
• If everybody sees different SERPs based on their searching patterns, how can you measure a consistent ranking? How can you reach an audience if their search queries are already *rigged* to show your competitor’s brand?

• On page optimization and link building will no longer have as much influence on your site’s rank for competitive search queries.

• Clients who opt-ín to personalization and visit their own sites may have a false impression that their sites are ranking well in the SERPs and cease or refuse SEO services.

• Clients who opt-ín to personalization and visit their competitor’s sites may have a false impression that their sites AREN’T ranking well in the SERPs and blame their SEO.

• Companies / brands with greater traffic have a better chance to gain new business because searchers will see more impressions of snippets to their sites. This creates branding opportunities via snippets.

• Webmasters will start optimizing more for other search engines like Bing where they can have more of an impact on organic results.

• It will become even more difficult to rank for generic keywords and search phrases (as larger brands will tend to dominate based on market search share), meaning long tail search queries will become much more important in an SEO campaign.

• Search spam should start to be filtered out as very few people will be revisiting spammy pages. That should eventually push more relevant, naturally optimized pages higher up the SERPs, particularly those in competitive industries.

• Fresh content will give sites an advantage because new pages are more likely to stand out to searchers in personalized SERPs. Same goes for real-time content generated by Twitter, Facebook etc. Static sites are going to fall to oblivion.

• Audience targeting and snippet relevancy will become more important when optimizing web pages.

• PPC ads will have to try harder to compete with increasingly brand-biased SERPs.

• PPC will become more popular as people find organic SEO too complex and abandon it.

• Personalization should help normally lower ranked sites to get to the top a little faster via loyal customers and visitors.

• Titles, META descriptions and text snippet optimization will become SEO priorities.
• Top SERP performers will fall down the ranks if their snippets and offerings are not competitive enough, allowing lower ranked sites to take over.
• Manually checking your site rankings, or those of your clients with personalization switched on will result in skewed, inaccurate SERPs.

• Rank checking tools like WebPosition will no longer be accurate. Clients will stop asking for ranking reports (hooray!).

• Some think that Google could be using personalization to monitor user-driven search in order to tweak the PageRank algorithm based on what users actually search for.

• Brand new sites targeting competitive search queries have very little chance of appearing in SERPs customized by personalization, even with SEO.
• If you don’t rank well now for your target search queries, you might slip further and further off the radar as searchers refine their SERPs by clicking on the higher ranked sites.

• If clicking on SERPs begins to impact what users see, hackers may develop malware etc. that automates SERP clicking.
Convinced that SEO is dead yet? Hold your horses. Let’s aim for some perspective here.

Why Personalization DOESN’T Impact SEO:

• Personalization has been in place for some time already – since 2005 in fact.

• The main Google PageRank algorithm still applies, it’s just the delivery of the results that has changed.

• Any SERP emphasis is user-driven rather than algorithm driven and personalization changes only relate to search queries closely aligned to your web history.

• Most non-personalized SERPs are not identical these days anyway. There is evidence of changes even based on the same search query on same PC in the same location a few minutes apart. Different datacenters and Everflux between them mean consistently shifting SERPs.

• SEO isn’t just about SERP ranking. Think usability, keyword selection, conversion design, branding, social media, online reputation management etc.

Social media optimization (SMO) is an important ingredient within your SEO and SEM campaigns. In the past, social networking sites were not much more than an oddity. Today, many have received enormous ranking authority from top search engines. If you are not leveraging these sites to improve your exposure and communicate with your niche consumer, your search engine positions are vulnerable to your competitors.

In this article, we will describe the influence that SMO currently has on search engine marketing. We will also give you the rules of engagement for executing an effective social media optimization campaign. We’ll explain what SEO social media is, and the advantages of hiring an experienced SEO consultant to spearhead your social media optimization efforts.

The Influence Of Social Media Optimization On Search Marketing

Search marketing has always relied upon exposure in the search engines to drive targeted traffíc. For years, gaining that exposure was based solely upon the development of your site and generating links pointing to your site. Both are still important today. However, social media optimization has shifted the landscape of search marketing.

Google once maintained several disparate search platforms for blogs, videos, news, and similar types of “social” content. Each functioned as a separate search engine with its own set of organic listings.

A few years ago, Google blended the listings from each platform into a system called Universal Search. Bing and Yahoo have since incorporated similar systems. Universal Search is now used as the primary index. That means blogs, videos, and news have been incorporated into the natural listings, pushing many sites off the first page. This is one of the reasons social media optimization has become a critical piece of search.

Another factor that has influenced search marketing is the increased ranking authority given to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and similar sites. These too, have quickly gained control of a significant amount of search territory.

Social media optimization preserves your current natural listings while helping you to gain even more search exposure. By using blogs, videos, and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you can capture a greater number of organic positions.

Your Social Media Optimization Campaign: Rules of Engagement

There are several rules of engagement for launching and executing a social media optimisation campaign. If you ignore them, your SMO efforts will be far less effective than otherwise.

First, you should do everything possible to encourage your audience to link to your site. Integrating a blog is valuable because your content can be updated over time, attracting loyal readers. Encourage readers to bookmark, tag and “Tweet” your blog posts by installing a button plug-in.

Second, link liberally as a resource for your visitors. Social media optimization is dependent on assisting others achieve what they’re trying to do. Once you engage your audience, help them find the resources they need by linking to them. Eventually, your site will become regarded as a resource hub, which will help you attract inbound links. That’s a vital component of SEO.

Third, you must be able to identify your market. Social media optimization relies upon the connections you establish with niche communities. You need to properly target them in order to engage them and generate content. This is true whether you’re engaging them through YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, or your blog.

Fourth, integrate tracking tools to measure and monitor the success of your social media optimization campaign. Track mentions of your site and company. Watch your site’s progress in the natural listings for your main keywords. Generate linking reports showing inbound links pointing to your domain and specific pages. Tracking your metrics is crucial in order to determine whether your SMO campaign is effective.

SEO Social Media Optimization Explained

Each of the elements of a social media optimization campaign that we have described thus far dovetail seamlessly with SEO. The ongoing content creation, tagging and bookmarking, attracting inbound links by being a resource for your audience – these are essential for pushing your website higher in the search engines’ listings. SEO social media optimization leverages a new set of tools to accomplish the same goal as SEO: more exposure for your site on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The challenge is knowing how to use those tools effectively.

The days of launching a basic SEO campaign within a competitive space and watching your site rise in the search engines’ results are long gone. SEO has become far more complex than it was a few short years ago. This is why many companies have made the decision to hire an SEO consultant. Social media optimization has transformed SEO from a relatively straightforward strategy into a complicated science. Having an experienced hand at the wheel helps to navigate the uncertain terrain.

If you want to boost your exposure in the search engines’ listings, consider social media optimization a priority.

Real Estate internet marketing is like any other kind of marketing, you’re trying to reach a niche market and must plan accordingly. You have to start by identifying your target market in order to develop your message conveying exactly the kind of high value business proposition which your niche will respond to.

The first steps are to:

1) Identify your target market; start with geo targeting and work with the demographics from there.

2) Decide how you want to be perceived by this target market and decide how you’ll foster this
perception.

3) Identify and refine your value proposition.

Once you’ve done this, the next step is to develop and distribute your value proposition, making sure that your value proposition is perceived by your target market exactly as intended. In marketing, shaping consumer perception isn’t just the most important thing: it’s everything.

You have to start by positioning yourself to be perceived in a specific way; from here, you’ll need to maintain, develop, grow or alter this market position as you deem necessary.

The real challenge is putting these principles into action:

Driving Traffic

There are some important principles of traffic generation you need to understand in order to be successful at bringing visitors into your website.

There are both principles and rules of traffic generation; principles have to do with your approach to the task and the rules are the practical nuts and bolts of driving traffic. You need to have an understanding of the larger picture before you can successfully put the practical techniques into action.

What you’ll usually see a lot of is the techniques alone. While this is still valuable information, you probably won’t get far with these techniques if you aren’t versed in the underlying principles of traffic generation.

These are the most important principles of traffic generation:

• Traffic generation isn’t a black art – it’s something which largely relies on common sense and methods which can be replicated with consistent results.

• The reason people usually fail in their traffic generation efforts is that they don’t truly commit to making traffic generation techniques a fully integrated part of their business strategy.

• You need to create a plan for driving traffic. Think of it as a road map; follow it, but remember that it’s not carved in stone. Your plan can and should evolve to reflect your real life experience and results.

• Continually test and track the results of your traffic generation efforts – and adjust your plan accordingly.

• Set goals for yourself and as you meet them, raise the bar; traffic generation is a process, not a single objective.

• Don’t be discouraged if you don’t see results immediately.

• Remember that driving traffic begins with building your site – Why is this? Because your site should be built from the ground up with visitors in mind. Look at other sites in your industry to gain an understanding of patterns of visitor behavior.

See what these other sites are doing; don’t hesitate to take a page from your competition’s playbook if you see something which is working for them.

This is where things can become challenging; it’s something like standing in Grand Central Station at rush hour with a megaphone, trying to be heard above the noise of the crowd. The goal here is to get the attention of your target market and get them to come to your site.

All business is arbitrage. You’re taking something which is cheap (to you, at least) and exchanging it for something of higher value – buy low, sell high.

For example, SEO and other free traffic generation strategies essentially trade your time for traffic which is of higher value to you; this value may be measured directly in monetary terms or in other means (for instance, as signups to a list). The same is true of paid methods of driving traffic like PPC advertising; you’re paying what you deem to be a small amount for something else which you see as more valuable.

If you’ve been reading carefully so far, you may have noticed that I haven’t said a word about being indexed by the search engines; that’s because this falls under the heading of techniques, not the principles of traffic generation. While you do of course want to be indexed, this isn’t your primary objective – and it’s something which will happen naturally as you work to drive traffic using other strategies.

Don’t lose sleep over the search engine crawlers; they will come sooner or later. Remember that even once your site is indexed, there’s no assurance that visitors will follow. Focusing on being indexed is losing sight of the forest for the trees. This will happen anyway as a side effect of using other traffic generation methods. What you should be focused on is getting targeted traffíc to your site. For instance, if you exchange links with another site (or even a directory) relevant to your industry, the search engine crawlers will follow these links when indexing this other site and voila! Your site will be indexed.

What you need to do is to let the web know that your site is there while simultaneously driving targeted traffíc. The best way to do so is to create links to your site from other sites; not only do these result in your site being indexed, but back links are great SEO and of course, they can generate traffic directly through visitor clicks.

In the next few weeks, we will be adding to this list of tools that you may find useful in your web design endeavors, So without any delay lets get started.

If you’re looking to increase the efficiency of which your website is crawled by search engines, then try using Site-map Creator.

This freeware creates XML files which will allow you to inform a search engine of URLs on your site which are ready for crawling.

As a webmaster, you undoubtedly use Google’s web services. If not, then I recommend you do so immediately.

To improve efficiency of your Google app usage, try using Google.mE.

This freeware program will sync all of your online Google apps.

Google Caffeine is the name given to Google’s “Next Generation” search engine, which it will use to rank and index all the pages on the wonderful world wide web. According to all indications, this is not just another one of Google’s infamous Updates, but a major “Overhaul” of its index and algorithm – the complex formula and calculations Google uses to rank all web pages, including yours.

If that doesn’t sound ominous enough, according to Matt Cutts (Google Spokesperson) one database is already showing Google Caffeine, and the full blown version will be released after the holidays. The reasoning behind this – Google doesn’t want to upset webmasters and site owners during the lucrative holiday buying season. In the past, other major Google Updates have come around this time of the year, most notably the “Florida Update” which severely affected many web sites and webmasters.
Recently, Google has been more aware and much more generous to webmasters by being more open and forthcoming in regards to how it indexes its pages. This time around, webmasters were even given access to a beta version of Caffeine which Google released last summer (’09) where webmasters could check to see how well their keywords and site would fare in this new search index. This beta site (www2.sandbox.google.com) has now been taken down by Google.

Like any professional search engine marketer who works online, I was constantly checking my sites and keywords in Google’s new search engine. I have drawn some conclusions from what I have observed, but please be aware it is often very foolish to draw conclusions and make predictions from a small sampling of results. You can end up with egg on your face very quickly, especially when you consider Google is probably still making adjustments and refinements on Caffeine as it analyzes the results.

However, there are certain ranking factors that even Google is telling us about, mainly “Site Speed” or how fast your site loads will play a part in how its ranked. We have also heard a lot about “Broken Links” and if your page or site has them, then it will probably be ranked lower. Of course, linking out to “Bad Neighborhoods” will probably still not be a good practice, if you want higher rankings within Google.

It should not come as a shock or a surprise, that “Over-All Page Quality” will play a greater role in how well your page ranks. Keep in mind, Google is like any other company putting out a product, if that product doesn’t have a high standard of quality, it reflects badly back on everybody concerned. Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are the key to all their online revenue, they must do everything in their power to keep that product fast, relevant, current and above all high quality.

Therefore, expect “OnPage Factors” to play a much greater role in Google Caffeine. Quality unique content, page design, good navigation, title, meta tags, description, keyword density, alt tags, page views, bounce rate, traffic numbers, time spent on page, and the number of social bookmarks may play an increased role in achieving high rankings. A perfectly optimized keyworded page, with the keyword in the title, description, meta tags, alt tags, on the page… will probably get you ranked higher in Caffeine, as well as most search engines on the web. This may be pure speculation on my part, but one of the areas Caffeine will be addressing or incorporating is “Social BookMarking”, that is the number of social bookmarks a page receives will determine how high it is ranked. I also believe one of the major reasons these bookmarks will become much more important has to do with the whole nasty issue of link buying.

Now, the integrity of Google’s index is not in question, but any savvy marketer or webmaster knows any individual or company with deep pockets and huge resources can buy their way into the top spot. Despite Google’s attempt to stop it, link buying and keyword positioning, is a thriving industry on the web. Rightly or wrongly, money and unlimíted resources will get you or your company to the top in organic search, regardless of which search engine you’re targeting.

All moral and ethnical issues aside, the small webmaster and/or online marketer is stuck right in the middle, with Google on one side and these major multinational competitors on the other. Looming on the horizon is Google Caffeine, a new sheriff in town!

What New Rules Will This Sheriff Bring?

The major question here is this: has the importance of backlinking been downplayed in this new index in favor of the keyworded domain and onsite content and optimization? Has there been a major shift to listing more quality content rather than relying on the number of backlinks a site is receiving, even from important related themed sites? The major problem and question to Google is this: if links can be bought, how do you keep your organic results democratic and fair, which was the original intention of Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they started Google in 1998.
One Possible Solution is Social Bookmarking

Will we see an ever growing importance of social bookmarks and links in this new index. It is quite easy to buy 1000 links, but getting 1000 or 10,000 “re-tweets” is a little more difficult. Similarly, getting two or three thousand “diggs” may be a little harder to pull off. Same goes for Del.icio.us bookmarks, Facebook fans… well you get the picture. Will Google’s use of these new social sites make Caffeine faster, more relevant, more current and most importantly of all, can it bring some democracy back into their index?

Of course, nothing in Google’s new index will be that cut and dry, that black and white. Other ranking factors such as age of site, past history and reputation, traffic numbers, authority branding… will all play a role in whether your site gets listed on that all important first page. However, on page factors may play a greater role – title, meta tags, description, keyword density, alt tags, page views, bounce rate, time spent on page, and the number of social bookmarks may play an increased role in achieving high rankings. Website speed or how fast your site loads may also be a new ranking factor.

Underlying this whole issue is the fact which many experienced webmasters/marketers already know, Google’s SERPs are not a one-trick pony anymore. For very lucrative (monetized) keyword phrases, Google’s results are broken up into Five categories… Info listings, Video listings, News Listings, Shopping Listings and Corporate Listings. Forget Caffeine, this is probably the fairest move Google has made in the last few years to make its SERPs more democratic.

Another even more puzzling issue for me concerning Google Caffeine is how much emphasis or ranking power will it place on “Keyworded Domains”, domain names which have your keyword or keyword phrase in them. Will these domains be ranked higher? Webmasters and marketers for years have been telling us we should always pick domain names which have our major keywords in them. Just common sense really, someone searching for “brown widgets” will more likely than not find that item at a domain called brownwidgets(dot)com or brownwidget(dot)com. The major SEO reasoning, all your backlinks will inherently have your searched keyword in the URL, thus bringing it up in the rankings.

Those new to blogging or article writing have often been told to focus on one very niche topic. One narrow vertical. That has commonly been considered the way to gain credibility, readers, links, and ultimately traffic, which assuming the blog/site itself isn’t your primary source of income, could lead to sales of your products/services. But is keeping it narrow really the best way to go?

For some, it is. Another way to go would be to cover as much ground as you possibly can. Throw a wide net out there and see what you catch. Once you see what you’ve caught, maybe you can catch more in the same area. The thinking is that the more ground you cover, the more people you are potentially exposing your work to. It’s going horizontal, rather than vertical.

Mike McDonald of WebProNews had an interesting discussion about horizontal content sites with Lawrence Coburn, president of RateItAll. As its name suggests, RateItAll covers a variety of topics by offering reviews (along with some social elements) for each vertical. They cover a lot of ground: pets, movies, music, television, beauty, travel, gadgets, video games, sports, Internet, auto, politics, celebrities, books, companies, camera/video, fashion, food, drink, health, and baby.

Demand Media, as Coburn says, is kind of the poster-boy site for horizontal content. They have an algorithm that helps them determine the content to produce. It has now been revealed that AOL is going down a very similar path.

The more resources you have, the better off you will be, of course. That is why big companies with deep pockets find the horizontal content angle so attractive. They can afford to pay to have a lot of people create content. In paid search, they can afford to bid on keywords across the board.

But just because it’s easier for a big company to go horizontal, that doesn’t mean a small business or a blogger/writer can’t keep the same principle in mind. Small businesses can find success in e-commerce, despite the fact that Amazon and Walmart are only a click away. The same goes for horizontal content sites.

If you’re going to go the route of trying to cover as much ground a possible, it doesn’t mean that quality should be sacrificed. It’s not about quantity over quality. Search engines like quality, and more importantly, so do users (who also like to share quality content via social networks). Search engines like Google want to deliver the highest quality results possible to the user, and they’re getting better and better at doing this as time progresses.

You may not be an expert in everything. Who is? There are different ways to construct quality content in areas you are less familiar with. For one, obviously, you can get experts to write content for you in any given niche. You can also perform thorough research before tackling a specific topic. The more you learn along the way, the more knowledgeable you will be anyway, and what is an expert if not someone that has a thorough understanding of a subject?

If you can cover more ground, you can attract a wider audience, which means more traffic, which means more eyeballs, which means more advertising dollars. AOL knows this, and is planning on making it a very significant part of its business. But even if you don’t have the resources of a company like AOL, it is still a model that can potentially earn you a living.