IT Technology and Services

After years of Microsoft trying to keep up with Google, they finally made some headway with the release of Bing, Microsoft’s new “decision engine”. Since the release of Bing, Google has released a pre-beta stage of a new Google engine named “Caffeine” .  Coincidence? I think not.

It is not Google’s norm to announce an upgrade release; they tend to keep the magic behind the curtains, so why the big announcement this time? Some would say it was to keep the spotlight on Google.  Now that Microsoft has come out with a “faster, better Search engine” Google wants to make sure they don’t lose their audience. Google claims not,  “Nope. I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve.” [1].

The new version of Google is to be better and faster, we all know Google is fast, how much faster can they make it? Well just about twice as fast! Speed is great and all, but what we all want to know is how is the new Google going to affect our search engine optimization efforts? What ranking, crawling & indexing changes will we see?

The new Google is to include more comprehensive ways of crawling the web and determining PageRank. The main goal is to return more relevant results – faster. According to Google’s Matt Cut the change is “primarily under the hood” [1] Google will still look the same but the bots will be working differently. When the new updated is released the most important words in SEO will “reputable and relevant”!

Google is working hard to get the users what they are looking for faster which means SEO’s will need to work  harder to keep up with the race.

A push in favor of reputable can only help our EBS SEO work  -we take the high road by helping our clients create rich content that should always be favored by the search engines.

To check out the Caffeine preview yourself you can go to:http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

[1]http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/page/4/)

We do web site marketing for a number of clients. In fact, we have seen a nice increase in this business area this year, which makes sense since it is a very cost effective way to find new sales! We graph our client’s website unique visitors per week. The desire to see data graphically comes from my engineering background! The graphs make is easy to see the data trend and to help see any jumps related to actions we have taken with their sites. The graphs also provide a great objective, fully visualized goal – we work hard to keep those graphs moving up!  Of course more unique visitors does not necessarily mean more leads or more sales, but there is normally a pretty good correlation. We also try to gather conversion data although that is internal to the client and they do not always share.

We have added a web site strategic analysis to our web site marketing process.  By stepping back just a bit and thinking about why the web site is and what it should be doing, we get some more solid direction on where, how and what to market on the site.

Another area we have had good success with is Google local listings.  Products and services that are marketed specifically to a local area can be highlighted in the local mapped listings area for metro areas. The same rules apply as the natural listings, but there are some specific additional steps that  get these placements for you.

We are exploring more fully the use of this blog for our site and our clients and I will have more updates on ways we are promoting and utilizing the blog for web site marketing.