Just noticed that Google is testing a version of SERP without the number of results and page load time. I only see that version when logged in using my Google account. The total number of results was never a reliable number and it has fluctuated a lot for some of the websites we have worked on. I believe the the traffic numbers for keywords from Adwords and other tools are much more reliable to determine competition than the total results number. Does an average user care about the total results? Will it effect how non-power users use Google? What do you think?
You run a small business. You sell products or services on a relatively small scale e-commerce website. You experience periods of growth in sales and revenue. Then you hit a wall and the revenue chart flatlines.
You’ve reached a critical juncture in the life of your business.
The solution: Ramp up your SEO efforts.
Search engines can bring you more customers who are looking for the products or services you offer. However, optimizing an e-commerce website with minimal resources can be daunting and challenging.
As an entrepeneur running an e-commerce website, you may have asked yourself the following questions at one time or another:
I understand SEO provides value; how much does it actually help drive traffic, sales, and revenue?
I have optimized my website but it doesn’t seem bring in any additional sales. Why?
When is the ideal time to start optimizing my website?
Do I try to optimize my website myself, or do I hire a professional SEO consultant to do it?
There is so much information out there. Where do I begin?
How well is my website optimized relative to my competitors’ websites?
Are there any tools that can automate SEO for my website?
How can I compete against companies like Amazon and Walmart on the Internet?
What are the three things I can do on my website immediately which will provide me with immediate results?
Our speaker, Gaurav Sharma will address these issues, and more, in this webinar.
Gaurav is the founder and CEO of ThinkMantra.com. He has years of experience managing SEO and web analytics responsibilities for various Bay Area venture-backed companies. He founded ThinkMantra.com to help small businesses and startups acquire customers and gain marketshare via SEO.
ThinkMantra.com provides purely white hat SEO services to help small businesses to grow their customer base using organic search primarily on Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Web buzzed yesterday with talk about Google Buzz. A lot of people I know have already got Google Buzz. If you haven’t, check out this write up by RWW.
Google Buzz has a feature called ‘image viewer’. In the demo it was showed that the image viewer fetches image from external sources Picasa and Flickr and display the images in full size within Google Buzz. I with others was concerned that Google might be pulling off images from ANY webpage instead of just Picasa and Flickr. This would not help websites with a lot of images as Google will ‘steal’ their traffic. I tested this with a few different websites and found that this is not the case with websites other than Picasa and Flickr.
Another thing I noticed that there are 2 ways to add links to GBuzz. One of the way is better than the other because it provides leverage with the anchor text. Surprisingly I did not see ‘nofollow’ attribute on Google profiles for the links shared using Google Buzz. I haven’t looked deep into it but if it is true, it will be helpful with SEO. Checkout the video below for a demo of how to add the link.
Google is in the air this morning! People talking about what tag to use for the event.
10:03: Event hasn’t started yet. I spotted Vic Gundotra (VP Engineering) in the room about 20 minutes ago, but he is gone now.
10:09: The event hasn’t started yet. There are 27 slides in the presentation. Starting in a few minutes, waiting for a “few people who are still stuck in traffic.”
10:14: Started – Bradley Horowitz up on stage.
10:17: Talking about real time and sharing and to manage attention better (hint – Twitter)
10:18: Getting to Yahoo’s history and the early search engines. There was no relevance. Then came Google!
10:19: When you have 500 or 5000 friends to manage the content. TMI (Too Much Information). The social network per user will grow. This has become a large scale relevance problem.
10:20: Launched Google Buzz!
10:22: 5 features
1) Auto following
2) Rich, fast sharing experience
3) Public and private sharing
4) Inbox integration
5) Just the good stuff (filtered content + content discovery)
10:26: Demoing Google Buzz, has a cool photo viewing and embeded videos.
10:27: Link sharing is copied from Facebook. Also supports gmail shortcuts.
10:28: You can use existing Gmail groups for private sharing. Todd Jackson mentions that it was difficult to use on “other websites”
10:29: Coments come in real-time in the inbox. Best Buzz gets to your inbox. They also have ‘@’ replies in the comments.
10:32: Demoing Recommended Buzz. If a lot of your friends liking or commenting it, Google will recommend it. You can say ‘Not Interested’ and recommendation engine will learn over time.
10:35: Vic Gundatra going to talk about Google Buzz in mobile.
10:36: Talking about location as a signal.
10:38: Google has mapped lat-long with locations.
10:39: Google.com brand new mobile homepage. There is a buzz icon on top right. It finds your location (like foursquare)
10:40: Buzz app will be availabe on buzz.google.com. Google Buzz will be mashed up with Google Map. There is a tab “Near By”. Google will find the most interesting buzz around you.
10:45: Google Maps app has buzz layer. You can post buzz using Google map app. There are white conversation bubbles in the maps app showing nearby buzzes which are geo tagged.
10:50: Google Buzz will be part of google apps, but not in V1. Buzz will start launching in 9.5 minutes. I will have screenshots as soon as possible. For rest of the world, it will be launched in next few days.
10:52: Sergey Brin on stage with Vic Gundutra, Todd Jackson and Bradley Horowitz.
10:53: There are privacy settings built into the Buzz. There are possibilities to integrate with Wave.
10:54: The system will be very open, it will support pubhubsubbub as of today. They will launch more APIs in coming months.
10:56: Sergey talking about Orkut’s success in the geographies it is popular.
11:00: You can connect external websites-services to pull in data into Buzz. You can’t yet post to twitter, but they plan to add the feature.
11:03: Buzz will use gmail’s spam filters and google.com’s scoring algorithms to score buzzes.
11:04: Google Buzz is launched at buzz.google.com. My account hasn’t got the access yet.
It is widely known fact that Google’s new Caffeine update is ready to go live. Matt Cutts announced at PubCon that they will launch it after the holidays season in US. He confirmed that caffeine can be accessed using 209.85.225.103 (50% of the requests).
From what we have gathered, it seems like it is live in India. At least the data centers our team members have checked.
Over the weekend, I noticed that emails from Google Alerts increased 5 folds for the keywords I have set alerts. I have subscribed to these alerts for a few years now and generally get 2-3 emails a per day per alert. Yesterday I received about 12 emails per alert. This leads me to believe that Google has switched the backend for alerts from current Google to Caffeine update. Caffeine has bigger index for all the websites we have looked at. This may just be a temporary bump as Caffeine is “catching up” with sending alerts for pages which current Google has not been able to find yet. Has anyone else noticed this?
A lot of people don’t know that Google has been executing Javascript in the HTML pages and including the output in their index. We found this a few months back. We noticed a website with Javascript drop down menus and no static links at all had most of their pages indexed by Google. What does [...]
After launching the regional tags, Google announced yet another update to the SERPs. They changed how images are displayed in the universal search by making the first image bigger than the rest of the images and adding two rows of images instead of just 1. The change only applies to universal search and not image [...]
We just noticed that Google is showing breadcrumbs in SERPs for a lot more pages now. Google was showing the “smart links” which intelligently parse the website’s hierarchy and displays it with deep links in SERPs. This is something similar to “site links” but can be controlled by SEOs and website owners to certain extent. Google started [...]
Last week I went to lunch with a friend to a nice Mexican restaurant in San Francisco called Mercedes Restaurant. It was easy to find on Google and had great reviews. But I noticed that the word Mercedes in the title of the homepage was regular type face in Google search result pages instead of [...]
Ever wondered what are the highest paid keyword on Google and how much would it cost? Laurie Sullivan recently wrote an article on MediaPost with some interesting stats on PPC rates for the 3 major search engines. Highest priced keywords: On Google was “Mesothelioma” for $99.44 per click On Yahoo was “Mesothelioma” for $60.68 per click On [...]
