Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

Google Reader is a tool that is free to use to follow anything on the internet with an RSS feed. For the most part this is blogs, but there are also video sites and other sources of content that use RSS feeds that you can follow. Whenever there is a new item, it comes into Google Reader much like an email would, making it easy to keep up with multiple sources.

One advantage of this application is that you can find related content to the information that you are already following. If you go to the Explore tab on the left side of the reader, there will be recommended items. These items are shown to you, based on what other blogs people with related content in their readers, are subscribed to. What is nice about this, is that most of the recommendations are relevant, quality information that you might be interested in.

Not too many people know the advantages of using Google alerts to increase website traffic. I have been using it for a few months now, and I totally love it. It helps me find relevant blogs, websites, or even Groups for keywords that I set up in my alerts, and Google sends me these results directly to my email every day.

For those who don’t know what Google Alerts is, and how you can use them to increase website traffic to your websites or blogs, let me explain to you quickly what it is, and what it can do for you and your SEO. Google Alerts is a notification / Alert system that Google has set up so you can receive email alerts from Google when ever Google finds specific website pages that you define in your Alert. What these alerts contain are specific keyword terms that you want to keep up on events for.

For example, with the World Cup Soccer taking place starting June 11 2010, you can set up an Alert for the keyword term “World Cup Soccer” in Quotes, and whenever Google finds that exact keyword term on websites that it crawls, you will receive an email alert about it. Pretty easy to understand, and a very powerful SEO tool that you could use to increase your website traffic and search engine ranking by building super targeted back links.

There are 6 different types of alerts that you can set up:
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Everyone has been ‘buzzing’ around the new social media platform launched by Google recently – Google Buzz. There is nothing outstanding about the layout – it’s a sort of Twitter meets FriendFeed design. The major difference (and advantage) Buzz has over the existent social networks is that it is integrated into your Gmail account. There are many other interesting features which have been discussed in much detail across the internet, hence in this article I will just concentrate on SEO implications of Google Buzz.

For Search Engine Optimizers, the two interesting aspects of Google Buzz are:

1. The ‘implicit‘ priority that Google Buzz will get on the Google Search Engine
2. The ‘auto-following’ - you can leverage Gmail to grow your social network more rapidly (compared with Twitter) since Buzz has a built-in viral feature by auto-following contacts

For the past few years, Google has moving towards a trend know as ‘real-time’ or ‘blended’ search. On your search result page you won’t only see organic (free results) and sponsored ads but also images, video, Twitter, MySpace and news posts (all as it happens). The opportunities for SEO here are:

1. Google may interpret links from these posts to your website as having some marginal impact on your PageRank.
2. People may read your tweets, news posts and thereby directly o to your website
3. The posts themselves may show up on Google searches and give you some temporary visibility for free and for your target keywords.