Caffeine Update – What does this mean?

I wrote a post about caffeine and when it was coming back in February. We were supposed to have seen it last December but Google added a new post on their blog this week – that Google caffeine had gone live.

What is Caffeine?

According to Google “it is a new web indexing system. Caffeine provides 50% fresher results for web searches compared to the old index”. Which means, the user can find information much sooner after it has been published than before.

A few more facts about Caffeine as quoted by Google:

What did the old algorithm look like before?

Google doesn’t really give too much away about how their algorithm works, but here is a diagram outlining the index before and after Caffeine.

Google's old index vs Caffeine

Why did Google build Caffeine?
To keep up to date with universal search, real time updates. People want to find the latest information as soon as it is published. The old index had different layers which were refreshed at different speeds.

How will it affect natural search?
Google indexes newer content more frequently which means fresher content will be indexed on Google quicker and appear higher in the search results.
It also means that content on sites will be indexed quicker as there is no index cycle – where website owners had to wait in a queue for Google to index their site.

What changes do website owners need to do?

Make sure you have fresh content on your website and everytime you build a new page, make sure it is optimised for seo.
Caffeine just emphasises how important it is for websites to not rely on just one traffic referral method. For example some sites may just rely on traffic via search engines, others may rely on back links. Instead, they need to use an overall online marketing strategy which includes online pr, social media, seo and ppc. There is a lot of competition in the search market and therefore sites need to make sure there is a lot of buzz about their brand.

Google Caffeine is live, you probably will not have noticed too many changes as the updates have been silently filtering through these past few months and now Google are saying the final version of Caffeine is complete.

I will post any new updates about Caffeine on this blog, so come back for more news.

facebook is Google’s biggest competitor

In the news last week, I read a very interesting article in the Times about how facebook is the biggest rival to Google.

According to Hitwise, for the week ending March 13th, facebook got more traffic than Google in America. Who would have thought this social neworking site set up by Mark Zuckerberg would have achieved this milestone.

Facebook now has more than 400million active users which makes it the third most populous “country” behind India and China. In the UK, it has more than 23million users, or a third of the population. The speed at which facebook is growing is staggering. Visits to facebook has increased 185% in the last year and Google’s number of visits has increased by 9%

There is a threat to Google, called “discovery” which is the finding of products/services on facebook that has been recommended by friends. More people will go onto facebook and search for products and reviews from their friends and peers instead of searching on Google. However, this information within facebook cannot be seen by Google as customers have to sign in to their account.

Social media is changing the search landscape. More people will be using social networking sites to find out news and information. Even Google wanted to get onto the social media band wagon with “buzz” but it failed to have made any headway in that area. People spend a lot of time on social media sites. According to Nielsen, facebook is the third most visited site with 2.5billion hits in February 2010 which is close to Yahoo’s 2.7 billion and Google’s 3billion. So Google better watch out, it doesn’t want to lose its position as the number 1 search engine.

Google Caffeine – When is it coming?

Well according to Google, it may not happen for months. But Matt Cutts said it would happen after the holidays. Maybe he was talking about after Easter?

Waiting for the caffeine to kick in

Last August Google first announced Caffeine. And they also set up a developer sandbox for user feedback
www2.sandbox.google.com but now it seems as though they don’t want people to know which IP points to the Caffeine data centre.

There has been talk of caffeine since August 2009. For those of you unaware of caffeine, it is an upgraded and new version of the Google search engine.

Matt Cutts described caffeine as:
“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

So after all the hype what is going on?
Google seems to be doing a lot of tests, perhaps they have found more issues than they are happy with before they want to announce caffeine is live.

According to Search Engine Land they get emails from people saying they think Caffeine is live. But Google says Caffeine isn’t live on Google.com — it’s still only at one data center, not much seems to have changed from last November when Matt Cutts said Caffeine was available at this IP address: 209.85.225.103.

Maybe Google have seen how many faults they have had with Google Buzz and are really trying not to let out a new product without fully testing it. If they wait any longer I am sure the other search engines will be releasing their own version of caffeine, they may call it coffee.

Photo is from flickr

Google Buzz

On Wednesday, Google announced their new social media product “Google Buzz”

Google Buzz

According to the guardian, Buzz has been rolled out to all of Gmail’s 150 million users worldwide, though not yet to those using Gmail inside organisations, where it is expected to arrive next month.

When it was being tested internally, it was called Taco Town, and proved popular for sharing high-definition videos, said Hugo Barra, a product manager. “Google is really good at sorting information,” he said. “That’s what we intend to do with social information as well.” Some critics say this is Google’s attempt at twitter and it is not really offering anything new and exciting. However, if Buzz were to be used by all Gmail users, then it would have more users than MySpace. Facebook is currently the number 1 social networking site with 400 million users.

But what about mobiles? Well it does not work on all mobile phones yet, just the iPhone and the Google Nexus. I am sure Google is working on making sure Buzz is available on more handsets.

So how will Google compete in an already saturated market place? Apparently, Google already tried to build social networking systems before. In 2004, it launched a Facebook like site called Orkut and successful in Brazil. Google bought Jaiku in 2007, a Twitter-like system but was abandoned by the company in January 2009.

According to techradar , Yahoo and Microsoft already offered similar services. Yahoo launched http://buzz.yahoo.com/ two years ago. And Microsoft say their Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.

It seems like Google have copied the name from Yahoo and the idea from facebook and twitter without offering anything new. It will be interesting to see if Google can make Buzz work.

Google branding

I have to say I am very impressed the way Google keeps modifying its branding.

This past week it was Wallace and Gromit’s 20th birthday and google had a team party image of them. It has also been Sesame Street’s 40th birthday and the rest of the week has seen images of different sesame characters on google’s home page. My favourite is the one with Elmo as below.

Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?

Sesame Street was set up in 1969 by the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) aimed to help all kids especially those that were from poor neighbourhoods to learn and prepare for school. The use of television for educational purposes had not been a proven tool before this time and Sesame street was ahead of its time promoting values we take for granted now. Some of these values were that everyone is created equal, accepting people from different racial backgrounds and not making assumptions based on gender. The show integrated muppets and people from different racial groups.

According to reuters to celebrate its 40th anniversary, Michelle Obama will appear on Sesame Street on November 10th. This will probably be the episode shown in the US and will be aired in the UK after.

Sesame's Count loves counting

Cookie monster says share

Google Wave

On September 30th this year, Google will release yet another product, but this time it is set to be bigger and better than any of its predecessors. Google first demonstrated its functionality at the IO conference last May in San Francisco. The service was restricted to just those at the conference and developers. From the end of next month, 100,000 members of the public will be able to test the product for themselves.

The new product is called google wave and is described as a communication and collaboration tool. Personally I think this is a big understatement, it is so much more than that and you will see why.

Having viewed the demonstration recorded at the conference I cannot wait to try out the beta version next month. There are so many functionalities, it is hard to begin to describe how this tool will revolutionise blogs, email and IM as well as photo and file sharing. One area which will bring a smile to IM fans is the live transmission which they have introduced on Wave. This means when you are talking to your friend “Jo” on line, instead of seeing “Jo is typing” you can see the characters appear as the she writes them and so you can start replying straight away. You can also invite other people into the IM conversation and they can use the “play back” functionality to see the conversation from the beginning, from before they entered the chat.. You can also share photos easily through Wave. Simply drag and drop the photos you have in to the conversation. With Wave you can also create a group album so that everyone in your group can see your photos. It is a much simpler way to create a group album than with Picassa. Some expect Wave will replace some of Google’s older applications.

If you would like to view the demo yourself, check out Google’s blog

The search engine monopoly

The google giant is in the news again this week, for launching the Chrome operating system (OS) for the mobile.
This is separate from Android and Google Chrome OS is aimed for those who tend to spend most of their time on line. It will power all computers, from small netbooks to desktop systems.

A company having more than one operating system, is not unheard of. Afterall, Apple has three OSes including Mac, iphone and ipod.
Google first launched the chrome browser in September last year and now has over 30 million users. Now they want to bring chrome into an operating system and I have no doubt they will succeed in this area.

Google is performing well in the search area where it became famous. According to Hitwise, google is the top search engine with 74% market share week ending June 27th. This is up from last year’s 69%. Since my last blog posting here, Bing.com which only went live last month, has seen an increase in market share from 3.4% in the beginning of June to 6.63% by the end. Not bad for a company entering an already saturated market place.

There have also been changes in the keyword field. People are typing in longer search queries.

Longer search queries have increased in popularity over the past year, on average searches of five to more than eight words in length have increased 8% from a year ago. Where there are searches of eight or more words, they have seen an increase of 16%. SEO experts be aware – the shorter search queries of one to four words long decreased by 2%. So next time you are thinking of bidding on keywords, think more along the lines of key phrases and insert these into your meta data.

What is new in SEO?

I know I haven’t written on my blog for a while. No excuses, except for the usual, busy with work, with study etc.

Anyways, a lot seems to have happened since I last uploaded a post.

Microsoft has launched its new search engine. That’s right, the company that seems to be always at the forefront of technology has decided to improve on its 8.2% market share of the search market and update its MSN live search.

Bing.com went live June 3rd.

Microsoft wants users to have a better search engine experience with its new product. Before Bing was launched there was a lot of hype about it, www.discoverbing.com was a site to introduce people to bing.
Bing is supposed to deliver a more organised experience, deliver better results than the search engines out there at the moment. It is marketed as a decision engine, it brings more relevant results. Also offers different tabs, not just images and maps, but videos and shopping as well, similar to google. I must admit, when typing in a search request in bing compared to google, I have got very different results.

The home page of bing will change daily but is already looking prettier than google’s with its different arty photos.

There will be a lot more news in the coming weeks about the new search engine. Feel free to add comments on what you like or dislike about Bing.

Start seo today

What is seo?

Seo has to be one of the most talked about subjects on the internet.

Seo stands for “search engine optimisation” and is the process of how to increase traffic to your website from search engines. Some of the most well known search engines are google, yahoo, alta vista and msn. Seo is a fundamental part in website development and maintenance and everyone who is managing a website whether at home or at work should be clued up on seo.

Don’t worry if you are new to this, if you keep reading seojoblogs, you will be an seo pro in no time.

Building a brand new site

If you are building your site from scratch you will want to  liaise with your graphics, marketing and development team to plan the site. If you are lucky enough to have these people on hand to help you.  Most of the time you will have to do this by yourself.  Don’t panic, here are a few simple steps to get you on your way.

1. Content is king

That has been said over and over again but I cannot stress the importance of dynamic and rich content which include targeted keywords.  You should have relevant text on your website which you update regularly.  This means when someone types in for example “Seo blogs” they will come to this site.

2. Meta information

The meta tags are the keyword and description tags.  The description tag is seen in the search engine results page and is therefore often seen as more important than keyword tag. However, both are important and contribute to search engine ranking. The meta information is in the code behind the web page and look like:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3″>

3. Title Tags
The title tags of each page are the most important element for SEO.  It describes a specific web page. Creating relevant title tag is a very important factor in achieving high position in search engine. Title tag should contain no more than eighty characters. The title tag is a representation of the core keywords.

4. Image Tags
Images on the website should all have ALT tags. Alt tags help visually impaired people browse the site.  They are also a place where keywords should be inserted to improve rankings in SERPS.

5. Header Tags
H1, H2, H3 etc. tags are not strictly essential but they do contribute to ranking.
H1 Tag are the main heading describing the content of the page.
H2 Tags are the subheadings on each page.
H3 tags are the smaller headings.

6. Sitemap
A sitemap page is essential to help Google find all the pages and also gives you a place to link to any new ‘SEO pages’. A sitemap is an interactive table of contents that visitors can view. The site map breaks down the website’s information into different categories and can include every page of the website. Normally it is found on the footer of a website.  Some, have all the links displayed below the fold of their website and it occurs on every page.  This is a great way to provide in bound links to your site – which I will talk about next time.

That’s it for now.  That wasn’t so bad as the introduction to SEO was it?