The last few days I utilized the new search engine Bing. I was skeptical at first of the new Microsoft product but was quickly impressed with the raw power of this new “decision” engine as they are branding it. I took notes in search results compared to yahoo and Google and I am going to share some of my insights into what I discovered (and opinions) 1. Bing has a better image search, I like the pop out feature to see the image a bit larger as well as the amount of images that are returned on the first page. It looks like they use “citations” to determine the image and do not have as much focus on alt and title tags. As webmasters have used images as an opportunity to put more keywords into the meta data, Google images has become less relevant. 2. Bing is showing favor to major websites, they are not showing site links except for – Read the full article
As a small business we are always looking for ways to collaborate with our team, clients and other developers on open source project. Today Google unveiled its newest tool to its growing arsenal of web based tools. Some people are calling this the replacement of Gmail! We are looking forward to testing these new product once it is released to developers (which should be soon!) 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. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where 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 – Read the full article
When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), everybody wants to be on the same page: Page One. And why not? The benefits of consistently showing up first on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, and other search engines are obvious. Businesses of all sizes and across all industries recognize the value and benefits of an optimized site, such as: increased number of visitors. Better brand recognition. Potentially higher transactions and sales, and potentially increased market share. Nowadays, you can’t afford not to optimize. One of Lakeshore Branding’s core strengths is Search Engine Optimization. We work step-by-step in a process that’s proven its success with our previous clients. We look at your on-page optimization and link development strategies. We study your competition. We customize our SEO packages to cater to your specific needs, goals, and budget. And we make sure that we deliver organic results consistently, so that at the end of the day you enjoy the edge that you need to – Read the full article
The new Search Start up company, Cuil, http://www.cuil.com/, is making news all over the place for claiming to have indexed three times as much of the Internet’s web pages as Google. There results are overly generic and sometimes were extremely unrelavant. And good luck getting a search that is more than two words long completed. A search for “elevateprinting.com” yielded a generic web portal first, “Mr. Lind’s Eath Science Page” second, and “Ms. Nyland’s Trimester Exam Review” third. (http://www.cuil.com/search?q=%22elevateprinting.com%22&sl=long) Surprising to see that elevateprinting.com, Google PR of 3, was no where to be found over three sites that it doesn’t appear Google cared to index. They also claim they need to run significantly fewer relative servers per query than Google. After getting the following error, maybe they should reconsider: No results because of high load… Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again. Overall it seems like they might have the right idea for – Read the full article
I was searching for a low cost option to for a phone number and came across Google’s newest acquisition GrandCentral. This free service gives you a local phone number that you can forward anywhere, voicemail you can customize based on who’s calling (friends, family, co-worker’s etc), listen to your voicemail on-line and even a website button for people to connect to you live. We will be testing on of these buttons on the green werks contact us page. The other thing that is unique is you get to keep the number for life…that means you can move change your number and don’t have to worry because you can just forward the calls to your new number. Just like most other Google services this is offered for free. I encourage you to try it out. I set my number up this week and think is is extremely valuable. Just shows where the technology is going and Google is continuing to take – Read the full article
One of my favorite services that Google offers is google reader. This service basically organizes all your feeds in one place. So you can follow the blog at Crains Chicago Business and Search engine land for example. Blogs are a great way to select the content that you want to read and google uses this tool to keep you organized. The world continues to get flatter….
Google Analytics is the tracking software used to discover who is visiting your website. Google Analytics can tell you where the hits are coming from, how long they are on your site, what pages they visited and i think most important- how they got to your site. I can see who is linking to me from where. This service has an huge value, previously companies would charge thousands a year for this service that google now offers for free. So if you have a website this is a must have to learn more about your visitors.
All website owners aim to land on the first few pages of search engine results, and that’s why various search engine optimization strategies are being implemented. After all, SEO is designed to enhance the search rank position of a business or a brand. Last year, however, website owners and SEO professionals received some serious beating no thanks to the Google Panda update. The search engine giant began changing the algorithms that determined a site’s page rank and search performance. The aim was to promote websites with original high-quality content; it also reduced the effectiveness of content farming, thus giving low preference to websites with low-quality content. A number of legitimate, well-meaning sites, however, were also adversely affected by this update. These changes made by Google have made it difficult for website owners to determine which SEO strategy to adopt – or drop – to make their SEO strategies and campaigns successful. But adjust we must, and move forward to align – Read the full article
