Google Expands Sitemaps on Google Webmaster Tools

Last week Google announced the launch of their new sitemaps features within Google Webmaster Tools. Let's take a look at the new features:

First and foremost, the visual changes to the area are clear. Data such as indexation and submitted URLs is now presented in simple but effective graphs, and the deeper information is all tabled neatly in easily accessible detail. Errors are displayed much clearer, and are grouped to make navigation and understanding easier. This makes the process of error diagnosis much smoother and easier as you can click straight through without having to trawl through several pages to get there. 

The new page displays the details dependent on the type of content - data is separated for web, videos, images and news results. As a result the Video Sitemaps Labs option is now redundant and so has been removed.

You can also now test a sitemap, through which a Google robot will fetch your file and analyse it for errors - though not comprehensively - before you actually submit it to Google Webmaster Tools. This means you can more easily avoid uploading a faulty sitemap and damaging your indexation going forward.

And, in a move vaunted by Google's blog, they've also changed the way the "Delete" button works. STOP THE PRESS. It now deletes the sitemap from all accounts within Webmaster Tools, where previously it would have just deleted it from your profile. However, Google may still crawl it, so the delete function is by and large redundant unless you block it via the robots.txt file. 

Google Social Share Lets You Start Conversations From Your Search Results

Every day of early 2012 seems to be a new chapter in the saga of Google’s social search  vs. the rest of the social media world. Here’s a summary of what’s happened in the last week or so:

Will Social Share make Plusers of us all?

Only a couple of weeks after controversy broke over Search Plus Your World, Google is pushing the concept of social sharing.

Here’s how it works in brief: search for a topic, then share the results on Google + without having to switch boxes. Other ‘Plusers’ see your post and can click on it to enter the search stream you have been browsing (without seeing your actions, of course). It’s definitely worth noting that Google Plus users now number over 90 million as of the 23^rd of Januar y 2012. That’s certainly significant, doubling the 40 million figure from October of last year. Bear in mind that Facebook currently has about 800 million users. This membership spurt is probably due to Google Plus realising that it has to become more flexible: for example it now allows users to sign up under pseudonyms.

It’s worth noting that Google aren’t the first big engine to produce social results. Since June 2011 competitors Bing have been using their alliance with Facebook to produce search results that are influenced by the number of ‘likes’ received by content posted on the social media giant. To keep their results relevant, they will continue to be algorithm based. The two services are now so integrated that you can add a friend or send them a message through Bing’s search results.

A single Privacy Policy means more of your data is available to advertisers

Without pausing to let us catch our breath, Google has also announced the unification of its privacy policies, planned to roll out March 1st. The new catch-all privacy policy will allow a user to transfer data from each Google product (Plus, Gmail, Youtube, etc) seamlessly.  By using all of the data from your activities on each of its platforms, Google will be able to come up with a highly personalised search for each individual. There is no ‘opt out.’ Either Google has access to all of your info or you cease to use its services.  

For advertisers, this is going to be very good news. Now there will be no restrictions on the amount of data you can use to create targeted ads.

Hey Google, Don’t Be Evil!

Meanwhile, a disgruntled alliance of developers from the reigning big three social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Myspace) are fighting back with a browser plug-in that goes by the name of ‘Don’t be Evil’ (a sly dig at one of Google’s unofficial founding mottos). This open source plug-in is a way of allowing users to compare SPYW and pure algorithm search modes.  Prominent SEO bloggers have already commented that Search Plus Your World is producing bugs in terms of search relevancy. 

Third-party workaround solutions like ‘Don’t Be Evil’ may be adopted widely among techies, but will they catch on with the non-techie users? It looks pretty certain that we have irreversibly moved away from search relevancy to social relevancy.  Among  other things, will the changes mean that PPC becomes even more powerful? We’re waiting to see how this plays out.

10 Tips for Google Analytics First-Timers

Google kicked off 2012 with some improvements to its free-to-use analytics platform. We’ve put together a list of tips that beginners and intermediate users could use to improve their website and ecommerce.  Here are new features to help you pick out the ‘actionable’ data from detailed metrics reports.  

It is important to let Google Analytics run for a couple of weeks to gather enough data before you start reacting to trends and amending your site.

The planning stage

What are you targets? Research your keyword queries using the Google Keywords tool.  Look at the competition and figure out how they are ranking for the keywords you want to bring people to your site.

Improve your organic rankings

The first thing you should do is use an overview of your organic traffic sources to see which keywords you are already ranking for. For low-ranking keyword positions  - creating a strategy to score higher with these keywords could be an easy rankings win.

Check up on visitor engagement

There are three key elements of your visitor’s behaviour that tell you how far you’re succeeding in engaging them. You can check up on this with three sub-tools:

Pages per visit

Averages the number of pages viewed by a visitor when browsing your website.  

Average Time on Site

This metric lets you measure how long visitors are spending on your pages.

Bounce Rate

You can see how many visitors left on the same page on which they entered. This will help you determine how best to utilise your entry page.

Analyse your social media engagement

How many people are coming to your site from Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and other social media platforms? You can track how mentions lead to hits and even how many are +1ing your content.

Use flow visualisation

Let’s say you have a multi-page process, like a checkout, for example. Flow visualisation provides you with an image of how traffic is following through or dropping off through this process. Check which ‘step’ is losing your customers and move quickly to fix the problem.

View multi-channel funnels

This attribution/visualisation tool shows which area of your campaign is responsible for a particular conversion. Every interaction a user has had with your website in the last 30 days is visible as a flow diagram. Older analytics platforms automatically attributed the credit to email (which is usually the step in the process that prompts a conversion.)

Tracking Adwords is key

Pay-per-click ads are those you see labelled “Sponsored” and listed around your natural Google search results.  They can also appear on Google’s content network as Adsense adverts. You can create Ad Groups, which are assigned a cost-per-click setting, as well as setting a cost-per-click for each keyword. CPC means that you are only charged when one of your ads is clicked on. Tip: a good Adwords campaign consists of tightly focused keyword groups. Ensure your Adwords tracking code is working 100% within Google analytics to ensure that the correct campaign, Ad Group and keyword data is being passed into the new platform. The easiest way to do this is to link your Analytics and Adwords accounts via the Adwords platform.

Build your own dashboards

Google Analytics will let you customise your dashboard so you can see the data that’s important to your SEO project. Customisation is recommended as the standard dashboard shows only ‘high level’ data that doesn’t express the many intricacies of your traffic. You can add metrics to your dashboard via widgets – like a pie chart – and even set the widget up to produce a report.

Create backup profiles

You can create all types of filters to get more specific information about who is doing what on your site. You can’t undo these however, so it’s recommended that you create one backup profile of your website that you don’t change.

Monitor cross domain tracking

You can modify your javascript code to more accurately record the traffic flow over two of your domains.

You might find the initial learning curve with Google Analytics a little steep. With a wealth of (probably) unfamiliar data on offer for the first time, it’s important to plan and be selective. Once you understand what each metric can tell you, you can start to successfully manipulate that data to your advantage.  

List of Google websites with country codes

 I had to look for this data today and it wasn't very easy. I want to share with you my findings:

Ideal for google scraping tools and keyword rankings. We will use it for our seo app irank.

Do a Barrel Roll in Google

Google is the most powerful search engine in the world, it earns billions of dollars per year, it has revolutionised the web and yet still astonishes everybody. We are not talking about a new technology that will help to solve all the global problems, but their latest “ innovation “ is a great little digital easter egg . Yes folks, while the Western society is facing one of the deepest recession of the history, the Google staff has spent their hours developing this new feature that at least will help everyone to cheer up for a while!

Simply head over to the Google search homepage now and search for “do a barrel roll”...you'll be impressed by what you see. It's also a great showcase of what you can achieve with HTML5 technology – all of which can be read by the search engines too. Bye bye Flash!

Google Finally Indexes Javascript & Ajax

Much to the chagrin of webmasters, developers and SEOs alike, Google have never been very good at coping with Ajax or Javascript content on websites and opt never to index their content. This means a wealth of comment plugins and more technical elements of people's sites have never been able to contribute towards their search engine content.

The onus has always been on us to find the solutions. We've had to hack round Facebook comments to get them to be read, even if we had hundreds of unique contributors via the plugin. But isn't it the search engine's job to index the content?

Well finally Google has seen sense and worked out a solution, at least for comments plugins such as Facebook's. It's been a few years since most have asked for it, but now Google will read and index this content, as shown by this official post on their Webmaster Central blog. 

Image from Search Engine Land.

Of course this may not be ideal for everyone. Many webmasters will have hidden content via these languages in the past to prevent Google indexing duplicated or useless content. There's now an inevitability that Google will read all this content and find all your buried secrets. Unfortunately it looks like you're going to have to come up with a new solution. They like to keep you on their toes don't they? 

Steve: The man who created the Apple of Eden

Steve Jobs is gone, and with him all the genius of a brilliant manager. He was not only a  revolutionary businessman, he was a man who had always believed in a dream, looking forward to the obstacles and the walls that envious people had tried to build up on his existence path.

His dream was to create a better world through a clean, pure and functional technology, and he passed away with a smile drawing on his face, because today his colossal enterprise is an emperor of billions and billions of dollars. He had beaten his eternal rival Bill Gates, the “ legal digital Mafia “ , who has tried in many ways ( legal and illegal , ethic and unethical ) to boycott the Macintosh.

But Steve Jobs didn’t lose his limpid ambition, he didn’t give up even when the Microsoft was on the crest of the wave with his “ informatic emperor “ and Apple was a drop in ocean of the market.
He had something in his voice, because after each speech made by him everyone was electrified and excited; he was able to touch the heart of riches and poor people.

Steve created a tech fashion, he programmed an innovative operative system but above all he climbs the mountain where on the peak all the dreams are contained.

We will miss this great dreamer, and what is the best quote to end an article dedicated to Steve Jobs? Easy:

" Stay hungry, stay foolish "  
 

Orchid Box SEO Agency : A golden bridge between UK and Italy

The world is changing fast, so is the marketing. Nowadays, expanding a business in another country is not a target granted exclusively for colossal enterprise.

With the invasion of computers followed by the internet revolution and the gradual creation of the European Union with his “free market“ the obsolete conceptions of “ border “ and “ geographic limits “ have became irrelevant. Therefore, most of the governments have adopted new philosophies of investment, with the result that the old law and tax system is being radically dispossed from all the bureaucratic chains which have strongly slackened the global commerce.

That’s why, to broader the horizon, it became a crucial point for entrepreneurs who wants to raise his profits. And Italy, a historic quadrivium settled in the middle of different culture, religions and continents , despite the doomy world economic crisis, still a competitive country full of potentials for foreign investors; especially if we talk about the internet sector which is rapidly growing and seems that this super-swelling of new surfers of the web wouldn’t arrest his furious flow.

The statistics are clear: more than 25 million Italians have used internet at least once, an 8% increase on the previous year, but the most astonishing result of this research is the wide number of senior citizens ( over 70 ) who have started to use the web, wrecking the prejudice that internet is only for youngsters. Most of the Italian users have joined the new frontier of social networks ( 18 million on Facebook and 1.3 million on Twitter ) confirming that a new and profitable field is ready to be “ cultivated “.And here the Orchid Box Agency plays a fundamental role: to be a solid and efficient bridge between the Great Britain and the Mediterranean archipelago. With several years of experience in the online marketing and a double base in the two opposite side of the Europe, Orchid box has set numerous partnership with important brands from both countries demonstrating a complete and forbid knowledge about the UK business market and of course to be excellently acquainted with the needs of the Italian company.

In fact, a team of professional SEO engineers and graphic designers is fully operating in Naples, while the headquarter is settled in the heart of London ( Covent Garden ) offering a wide range of services: from Web designing to SEO site optimization, or Pay Per Click strategy and various, well-advanced and intuitive tools in order to improve the stream of traffic or just to simplify the managing of your site. That’s why so many new clients have already chosen the trustful Orchid Box Agency to develop new campaigns in Italy, because avail yourself of a young and brilliant consulting service is the first step to reaching the climax of profit. In those days where the world economy is frighteningly wobbling and tottering on the edge of a gorge, and what before seems a sure and rich investment today has quickly became a hazardous gamble, what is better than a professional and efficient adviser?

Thus, our motto is: Got an idea? We can design, build, develop and promote it to perfection.