Google Archives - GUJRAT INDIA

Search Engine History – Web Search Before Google

Did Google always dominate the web search market? In the second of three posts on the history of the Search Engines, I look at the pioneers of the early search market, including the very first web crawler, WWW Wanderer. Did you know that Disney used to be one of the biggest players in the business? Or that Altavista was more technically advanced, in many ways, in 1998 than Google is now? Read on!

The pioneering Web Search Engines

Really, the point at which modern search engines first begin to appear is after the development and popularisation of the MOSAIC browser in 1993. In 1994, Internet Magazine was launched, together with a review of the top 100 websites billed as the ‘most extensive’ list ever to appear in a magazine. A 28.8Kbps modem was priced at $399 and brought the internet within the reach of the masses (albeit slowly)!

At this point and for the next 4-5 years, it was just about possible to produce printed and web-based directories of the best sites and for this to be useful information for consumers. However, the rapid growth in the number of www sites (from 130 in 1993 to over 600,000 in 1996) began to make this endeavour seem as futile as producing a printed yellow pages of all the businesses, media and libraries in the world!

Whilst WAIS was not a lasting success, it did highlight the value of being able to search – and click through to – the full text of documents on multiple internet hosts. The nascent internet magazines and web directories further highlighted the challenge of being able to keep up with an internet which was growing faster than the ability of any human being to catalogue it.

In June 1993, Matthew Gray at MIT developed the PERL-based web crawler, WWW Wanderer. Initially, this was simply devised as a tool to measure the growth of the world wide web by “collecting sites”. Later, however, Gray (who now works for Google) used the crawled results to build an index called “Wandex” and added a search front-end. In this way, Gray developed the world’s first web search engine and the first autonomous web crawler (an essential feature of all modern search engines).

Whilst Wanderer was the first to send a robot to crawl web sites, it did not index the full text of documents (as had WAIS). The first search engine to combine these two essential ingredients was WebCrawler, developed in 1994 by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington. WebCrawler was the search engine on which many of us early pioneers first scoured the web and will be remembered with affection for its (at the time) attractive graphical interface and the incredible speed with which it returned results. 1994 also saw the launch of Infoseek and Lycos.

However, the scale of growth of the web was beginning to put indexing beyond the reach of the average University IT department. The next big step required capital investment. Enter, stage right, the (then huge) Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and it’s super-fast Alpha 8400 TurboLaser processor. DEC was an early adopter of web technologies and the first Fortune 500 Company to establish a web site. Its search engine, AltaVista, was launched in 1995.

Founded in 1957, DEC had during the 1970s and 1980s led the mini-computer market. In fact, most of the machines on which the earliest ARPANET hosts ran were DEC-PDP-10s and PDP-11s. However, by the early 1990s, DEC was a business in trouble. In 1977, their then CEO, Ken Olsen, famously said that “there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”. Whilst somewhat taken out of context at the time, this quote was in part symptomatic of DEC’s slow response to the emergence of personal computing and the client-server revolution of the 1980s.

By the time Altavista was being developed, the company was besieged on all sides by HP, Compaq, Dell, SUN and IBM and was losing money like it was going out of fashion. Louis Monier and his research team at DEC were “discovered” internally as the ultimate PR coup; the entire web captured – and searchable – on a single computer. What better way to showcase the company as an innovator and demonstrate the lightning fast speed and 64-bit storage of their new baby?

During 1995, Monier unleashed a thousand web crawlers onto the young web (at that time an unprecedented achievement). By December (site launch) Altavista had indexed more than 16 million documents comprising several billion words. In essence, Altavista was the first commercial-strength, web-based search engine system. AltaVista enjoyed nearly 300,000 visits on its first day alone and, within nine months, was serving 19 million requests a day.

Altavista was, indeed, well ahead of it’s time technically. The search engine pioneered many technologies that Google and others later took years to catch up with. The site carried natural search queries, Boolean operators, automatic translation services (babelfish) and image, video and audio search. It was also lightning fast (at least in the beginning) and (unlike other engines) coped well with indexing legacy internet resources (and particularly the then still popular UseNet newsgroups).

After Altavista, Magellan and Excite (all launched in 1995), a multitude of other search engine companies made their debut, including Inktomi & Ask Jeeves (1996) and Northern Light & Snap (1997). Google itself launched in 1998.

Of these early engines, each enjoyed its own enthusiastic following and a share of the then nascent search market. Each also had its own relative strengths and weaknesses. Northern Light, for example, organized its search results in specific folders labeled by subject (something arguably still to be bettered today) and acquired a small – but enthusiastic following as a result. Snap pioneered search results ranked, in part, by what people clicked on (something Yahoo! and Google are only toying with now!)

In January 1999 (at the beginning of the dotcom boom), the biggest sites (in terms of market share) were Yahoo!, Excite, Altavista and Disney, with 88% of all search engine referrals. Market share was not closely related to the number of pages indexed (where Northern Light, Altavista and a then relatively unknown Google led the pack):

Search Engine Share of search referrals (Dec 99)

Yahoo! – 55.81%

Excite Properties (Excite, Magellan & WebCrawler) – 11.81%

Altavista – 11.18%

Disney Search Properties (Infoseek & Go Network) – 8.91%

Lycos – 5.05%

Go To (now Overture) – 2.76%

Snap / NBCi – 1.58%

MSN – 1.25%

Northern Light

Behind the Form – Google, The Deep-Web Crawl, and Impact on Search Engine Visibility

Crazy Things That Really Rich Companies Do

Kind of like that weird guy at the party with an acoustic guitar and the Pink Floyd shirt, Google is getting DEEP. Some would say…uncomfortably deep. After an already busy year, wherein Google released an open source mobile OS and a browser that’s rapidly gaining market share, they recently announced that they had mapped the sea floor, including the Mariana Trench. And hey, why not found a school featuring some of the greatest scientific minds out there and see what happens?

So Google’s been more visible than ever lately, and there’s no doubt that this’ll continue as they get their hands into more and more projects – but let’s drop down a few floors and look at something that should dramatically affect the way Google’s indexing programs (“spiders” or “crawlers”) collect data, analyze websites and present the results.As much work as the BEM Interactive search engine marketing team puts into making sites appeal to spiders (and there’s a lot we can do to make those spiders love it), the spider programs themselves are pretty straight-forward: hit a site’s page index, check out the structure and content, and compare that to what Google has determined to be “relevant” or “popular.”

But because of the way these programs are written, there are certain areas that they simply can’t reach…namely pages that require human information, input, or action. As a basic example, there’s usually a confirmation page after a user submits a “Contact Us” or “Newsletter Sign-up” form – this could contain a promotional code or some other kind of unique data.This dynamically generated content (this could also be a search results page, calculations or conversions, even the results of a symptom tool on a medical site) simply doesn’t exist until the user creates it! Depending on the form you filled out, the resulting page is yours and yours alone – so try to ignore that tingle of omnipotence next time you Google something.

But search engine spiders can’t understand what the form is asking for or the info being delivered to the user – and even if they could, how would they figure out what to insert in order to generate any relevant content? Drop-down boxes, category selection, zip code input – any of these forms can prevent data from being indexed. Collectively, this blocked data is referred to as the “Deep Web.” By some estimates, the Deep Web contains an astounding amount of data – several orders of magnitude more than what’s currently searchable. Since they chiefly rely on site maps and hyperlinks, search engines crawlers just can’t find a way to access the information.

So can Google really expect to find, log and interpret this data? Well, between mapping the ocean and opening a school that will probably discover the meaning of life before lunch, Google did just that. Working with scientists from Cornell and UCSD, Google researchers (whom I can only hope will not become supervillians at some point) have devised a method for their spiders to complete and submit HTML forms populated with intelligent content. The resulting pages are then indexed and treated as regular indexed data and displayed in search results – in fact, at this moment, content gathered from behind an HTML form is displayed on the first page of Google search queries 1000 times every a second. The methods the bots are using are pretty cool, but I’m Nerd McNerdleson about that kind of thing. So we won’t dive in to the technical stuff here, but check out the article if you’re into it.

That’s cool…NERD. But what does it mean?

Everyone knows Google loves relevance – their entire business model is built upon it. This technology is about pulling exactly what the user is searching for and immediately providing it without even requiring them to visit any page outside of the Google results page! Spooky.

Say that you’re feeling under the weather. Rather than type in “symptom checker” and find a WebMD-type page, you type “coughing, runny nose, strange bubonic plague-like swelling” directly into the search engine. Google – who has already had their spiders hit every medical symptom form out there, query them in endless varieties and combinations, and determine the relevance & popularity of the results – immediately comes back with “You’ve got the Black Death” and you’re set (or…maybe not).

From a retailing standpoint, many sites have functions to generate product lists based on user input. As it stands now, a shopper looking for a red, American-made minivan with under 30K miles would find the appropriate website, input his or her criteria, whereupon the website would query the database and return the results. If Google continues to move forward with their deep web crawls, this information could be displayed directly through their outlet of choice without the user ever accessing any site other than Google (if the user makes a purchase, does Google get a cut? Hmm…)

Obviously, this is a massive step forward in search technology and, in an industry that seems to change every hour, represents a new method of obtaining and presenting information. As web marketers, this is another variable, another challenge to consider in our work – how can we optimize pages that can be generated in a seemingly limitless number of ways? With search engines becoming increasingly more powerful and their data mining capabilities getting deeper, will there come a time when all data is presented through one aggregate portal? This may be years down the line, but the technology and the foundations are here now; forward-thinking businesses and web marketers need to be there as well.

Best Google Website Tools in 2018

Google Analytics

In this digital age, the importance of data to a business/website should never be underestimated. In fact, without proper tracking of website traffic, a business is literally lost, especially when it comes to how to optimize the website and make full use of it.

Whether your website is run in the form of a personal blog, news portal, business or corporate page, ecommerce store, Google Analytics is considered an essential tool for every website. The more you use this highly powerful Google tool, the bigger advantage you have.

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. You can create goals and conversion tracking to get the most of your analytics information and use it to improve your website’s content, user experience and optimization for better online sales.

Out of so many features in Google Analytics, I think the ability to identify the Source / Medium to your website is one of the best website tools. Based on the data shown, you can find out if your marketing efforts have been paid off or not. This can provide a solid reference for your next decision making in enhancing your website performance.

Google Data Studio

Trust me, for beginners, you might be overwhelmed by all the amount of data shown in Google Analytics. To be frank, sometimes you just need a simple report with chart, graph or pie to summarize the performance of your website.

Here is a free tool from Google called Google Data Studio, which gives you everything you need to turn your analytics data into informative, easy-to-understand reports through data visualization.

Analytics has always been a challenge for digital marketing, however, Google Data Studio allows you to create customizable data visualization and report. Besides, you can even share with your clients – a huge plus especially if you are working in a big group.

Quick tip: You can check out Google Data Studio Gallery to duplicate their samples and modify to your website use. After that you will be able to change and edit the metric according to your needs. Quite amazing, right?

Google Search Console

Previously known as Google Webmaster Tools, now rebranded to Google Search Console, this free web service is designed for webmasters. It allows you to check the indexing status and optimize the visibility of your websites.

This free tool is a MUST for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The power to track your site’s search performance is the most precious data to understand what the audiences want for your site.

Once the website is tracked by Google, you’ll be able to view your organic search results right alongside the performance statistics for the organic search queries. This information helps you better understand how paid text ads and organic search results work together. If you analyse deeply enough, you will find many opportunities like identify relevant search queries that have low organic traffic volume and target these keywords in Google AdWords. This will increase your overall traffic, tailored to the objective of your website.

Google My Business

Are you operating a brick and mortar business? If you are, this free tools from Google is one of the most local SEO strategies to strengthen your website. Google My Business is a powerful tool for businesses and organizations to manage their online presence across Google, like Google Search and Google Maps.

As smartphone penetration in Malaysia approaching 100% by 2018, the majority of Malaysians are using smartphones for navigation, searching for instant answers or browsing social media platforms. Your business and brand need to be found online with the correct information.

Make sure all the listed information is correct, up-to-date and reflect your business. Remember, those info will appear when people search for your office or physical store via Waze or Google Map. We often see some of the business hasn’t updated their address, phone number and business hours to the latest. Wish to gain my traffic to your website?

You should try the new the features from Google My Business called “Posts”. The published content will display your image and short description with call-to-action link to your intended URL. For example, blog post “Should I hide or even remove client inquiry on my Facebook?” will appear at the bottom of our business info.

Google Keyword Planner

Building a website without keyword research is exhausting and time wasting in long-term. In order to reach the right customers with the right keywords, you should use Google Keyword Planner to discover relevant keywords. Inserting those keywords into your website will ensure your content remains relevant.

*To access Keyword Planner, you need to sign in to your Google AdWords account at http://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner. Create the account is free of charge and fast.

Yes, it’s completely free, you can find new keyword ideas that are relevant to your product, service and target customers. Keyword planner will show you the search volume data in historical statistics which is one of the most important key factors for your website.

Furthermore, the data from keywords ideas is a useful tool for SEO to your website. Analyse the information and turn it to your next content marketing strategy. Based on the search terms data, you should have plenty of ideas what should can be inserted to your text to make it more relevant to your audience.

Google Tag Manager

This free tool helps you update tags and code snippets on your website and mobile app quickly and easily. You can insert JavaScript and HTML tags used for tracking and analytics on websites in Tag Manager without touching the back end of the website.

Many websites do not deploy tracking function or have unreliable data collection because of messy codes injection. To solve this, we highly recommend using Google Tag Manager to consolidate and manage all your tracking codes or scripts.

The best example of using this tool is to use Facebook Ads. While more and more businesses are spending on Facebook Ads, most of them do not install Facebook Pixel into their website for conversion tracking, optimization and remarketing purposes.

Facebook Ads is already integrated with Google Tag Manager for smooth and easy installation. All you need to do just click and follow the instructions given without any need for complicated coding.

Test My Site from Think With Google

In order to rank well in mobile Google Search, your website should have fast loading speed and a mobile-optimized website. Use the Test My Site tool from Think with Google to check your website score on mobile performance. After a few minutes, you will receive recommendations on improving website performance across all devices.

Nobody wants to wait for slow websites or browse non-mobile friendly websites. The suggested time is 3 seconds from Google, which means if your site doesn’t load completely within 3 seconds, most people will most probably go elsewhere.

Just insert your email address and you will obtain the detailed analysis about your website. The content of the report is simple, but provides valuable insight into how Google ranks your website speed.

The report will become a crucial reference to your webmaster or web developer to further optimize the website. If you need even more in depth report about how Google renders and indexes your website, you should use the PageSpeed Insight tool.

Google PageSpeed Insight

If you have web developers or web designers that really want to understand the factors to increase your website speed, give PageSpeed Insights Tool a try and check your score on your website’s speed and optimization.

The latest version now shows the data from your First Contentful Point (FCP), the measurement when a user sees a visual response from the page. DOM Content Loaded (DCL), as well as the measurement when HTML document has been loaded and parsed.

PageSpeed Insights is handy in providing insight on how Google indexes your website differently for desktop and mobile versions.

Here are some website speed optimization tips from PageSpeed:

Avoid landing page redirects
Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold contents
Enable compression
Leverage browser caching
Minify CSS
Minify HTML
MInify JavaScript
Optimize images
Prioritize visible content
Reduce server response time

Google Trend

Wish to see the latest trends and data from Google? You can search anything via Google Trends and even narrow down to specific country or category. This tool is useful to identify latest trends or viral news in your location.

Ideally, once you identified a trend, you can craft new blog posts, new promotions or ideas that reflect the said trend.

Don’t forget that you also can view the interest traffic of search terms using Google Trends.

With this, you can spot the best time to launch specific campaign. This is helpful for seasonal campaign or annual promotion because you can discover the best timing for your ad hoc digital marketing campaigns.

Google Alert

If you want to be aware of a particular topic and all the related information that bubbles up in the news, you can have them all automatically delivered to you with Google Alert and get notified every time when your keywords or phrases have new updates.

Google Alert is good for simple keyword monitoring, with updated on every mention of those keywords being sent to your email inbox for almost real time notification. Of course, you can choose the frequency at which you’ll receive them – once per day, once per week or even get them as they just happen.

A useful tip when creating the Google Alert is to avoid using generic keywords but create alerts that are more unique to your website. The more precise the keywords, the more relevant are your alerts. For that, you should utilize the search filters wherever possible, such as languages, region or sources.

Summary

So, that’s it, above are the 10 must-have free Google tools to improve the performance of your website. Make full use of all tools from analysis, research or monitoring to achieve the objective of your site.

What are your favourite tools from Google? Do you know any other Google tools that we should cover? Let us know in the comments below!

How to Claim and Verify Your Google My Business Listing

Let’s face it, if your business isn’t on Google, you don’t exist. Did you know that well over 90% of all search engine traffic is Google? Today, people don’t bother memorizing much of anything, and really why should they? It’s all on Google. True.

How many times have you searched for a business on Google, and off to the right is a box with a map of where the business is located, the phone number, hours of operation, picture, and even a link to their website. It’s like Google wants to give every business a free advertisement. Well, actually Google wants to make it as easy as possible for the user to find exactly what they are looking for in 0.000048763 seconds – so, we all keep coming back.

Mobile Search Traffic is Up

You see, Google knows that they will remain the number one search engine as long as they make the user’s experience simple and seamless. Did you know that currently in 2019 over 65% of all Google search traffic is mobile? Wow, right? What could be easier for a mobile user than “ALL” the pertinent information ‘front and center’?

How Do I Get a “Google My Business” Listing for My Company?

Okay so, now you are asking yourself, “how do I make sure my business has a box listing at the top of the Google page when someone searches my business?” Well, this is the easy part. In fact, it’s so easy you are going to ask yourself; “why didn’t I do this before?”

Let’s take you through the simple steps. But first you have to Google your business name on Google Maps and see if it shows up. If it does show up, it’s because the Google Search Engine algorithms have found information from other sources and put it there for you, and for your customers (the user).

Claiming My “Google My Business” Listing

If you find your business already listed, then click on the button that says “Claim this Business” and the Google Tutorial will take you through the process. Remember: it’s really easy! Oh and be sure to claim your business before someone else tries to – a good incentive to do this ASAP.

My Business Isn’t Listed Yet, But I Really Want

My Free “Google My Business Listing” Now!

If it isn’t there, then you need to go to Google My Business Page and click the “Manage” button and it will take you through all the steps needed. Their system sends you verification code, just wait until the verification code comes before you start and follow the totally simple steps – seriously, a third grader can do this, yeah and probably better than any of us?

Once you have your listing you will also have a business profile page when you log in. Simply edit the information you want to appear on Google when people search for your business. You can customize Your “Google My Business” listing and add your:

Website Link
Phone Number
Hours of Operation
Logo and/or Pictures of Your Business

Okay so, that’s it – simple right? Well, some of us aren’t as smart as a third grader when it comes to all this high-tech stuff. So, if you are like me, you might want to watch a quick YouTube Video on How to Claim and Verify Your “Google My Business” Listing first.

Then you can follow the simple instructions above, and click around until you figure it out. Seriously – this is really easy. And, you have to love the price! Do you ever wonder why FREE is a 4-letter word? That is only thing about this “Google My Business” listing thing that doesn’t make cents.

Google Translate Serbian Tool – Should Human Translators Be Worried?

“Machine translation”. Translators shudder to hear those words! It is partly in disgust, due to a firmly-held belief that a computer will never replace a superior human translator (like us!), partly because we are scared stiff that it will! So we either vehemently deprecate machine translation, or we carefully skirt around the subject and hope, for example, that our customers won’t find out about the Serbian-English-Serbian translation tool, recently made available for free by the almighty Google (link below)!

Because the fact is that Google’s translation tool, which now provides automatic translation into English of Serbian websites and of copy-pasted blocks of Serbian text, is really surprisingly good (we will not discuss Google’s English-Serbian translation tool in this article, i.e. the reverse direction, as it is pretty awful right now)!

Rather than acting as if it didn’t exist, we think it is better to get this subject out in the open and examine its implications for the clients of translation companies and for the translation industry in general. So this will be the first in what is planned to be a series of articles looking at automatic and machine translation, both in the context of Serbian-English translation and of translation in general. In this article we will look briefly at the quality of Google’s automatic Serbian-English translation and explain why we do not think translators and translation companies working in the Serbian-English pair should be too concerned for their livelihoods right now.

An example of Google’s Serbian English translation

Let’s carry out a little experiment first. We took a paragraph of Serbian text (taken from a Serbian Wikipedia article) and pasted it into the Google Serbian-English translation tool.

A human translation from the Serbian to English would read something like this:

A translation memory is comprised of segments of text in the source language and of their translation into one or more target languages. These segments can be passages, paragraphs, sentences or phrases. Individual words are not handled by translation memories, these are dealt with by terminology bases. Research has shown that many companies using multilingual documents use translation memory-based systems.

Within a few seconds, Google Translate outputs the following translation into English:

Translation memory consists of segments of the text in the original language and their translation into one or more target languages. These segments can be passages, paragraphs, sentences or phrases. Individual words are not in the field of translation memory, but they deal with terminoloske database. Research shows that many companies have multilingual documentation systems used to translating memory.

Can you understand it? Apart from a few problems the translator had in identifying passive/active constructions and an unknown word, of course you can! It’s certainly a lot better than any Serbian-English machine translation tool we’ve tried before. If you look at what an old-style machine translation (which shall remain nameless) did to this paragraph, maybe you can begin to appreciate how good Google Translate is:

Prevodilacka store sastoji oneself off segmenata textual on izvornom jeziku too njihovog prevoda on unity whether over ciljanih jezika. Those segmenti might lie flinders,pasusi,recenice whether fraze. Pojedinacne reci did not of domenu prevodilacke memorije,vec oneself to them bave terminoloske baze. Istra%u017Eivanja pokazuju ought mnoge kompanije wo there are visejezicku dokumentaciju koriste sisteme with prevodilackom memorijom.

I beg your pardon? That was supposed to be English, in case you were wondering! And NO, we did not doctor this in any way! Also, if anyone can tell us what “flinders” are, then they know more Middle English than we do!

Google Translate is perhaps not as successful with all texts as it was with this one, but it is certainly a major improvement over the above example in practically all cases! So perhaps translators should think twice before discounting machine translation from Serbian to English (and other languages, if this is anything to go by).

What makes Google Translate different?

Google’s system is a little different to previous machine translations in that it uses a statistical method to analyse existing translations from Serbian to English and applies what it has learned to the new text. Old-style systems merely use a dictionary to translate texts word-for-word by “brute force” and tend not to be very successful. However, it should be noted that Google themselves have recognised that their statistical method has now hit a wall of diminishing returns and it is unlikely that, as the technology currently stands, the standard of translation will be able to improve appreciably, and that goes not just for Serbian and English, but for all language combinations.

Death-knell for human translators?

So are we crazy to tell you all this? After all, translation companies rely on the (paid) work of human translators! What happens if all your clients go off and begin using Google Translate free of charge? Indeed, we have already seen examples of amateur translators supplying “translations from Serbian into English” that have clearly been carried out using this tool! It is only a matter of time before translation companies begin receiving “previously-translated” texts (texts that suspiciously resemble Google translations!) from clients and being asked to “just proof-read this” for a rate considerably lower than a translation from scratch would cost.

Well, we would like to talk about a few reasons why you and your clients should know about Google Translate for Serbian and English and why we think translation companies need not fear for their business:

A translation business should value transparency and seek to work within the realities of the market – it does not make long-term business sense to “hide” valuable resources like this from our clients! Besides, they will find out about it sooner or later! Rather, we should accept the reality that tools such as this bring to the translation industry – the market will always be changing and we need to be prepared to adapt, not cling to an outdated reality.
We should want our customers to use Google Translate for Serbian-English translation! After all, the vision of a translation company should be to enable their customers to communicate with other markets and cultures. So if this tool helps a client who only understands English to understand a text in Serbian, then you have surely gone some way to achieving this vision!
But the core of the issue and the reason translation companies have nothing to “fear” from Google Translate is what you have been suspecting all along: computerized, automatic translation is not going to replace professional human translation from Serbian to English (or any other language) any time soon. Or let’s phrase it as a question: would you, as the marketing manager of, say, a Serbian company wanting to do business in the West, entrust the translation of your website or of your corporate magazine into English to a machine translation tool? The simple reality is that, no, you would not.
This is not necessarily to knock automatic translation tools – they are after all a soft target for us superior human translators! They may well have their applications, and we may discuss this in another article. This is merely to say that any business that is serious about a given market, given the current quality of machine translation, will settle only for a professional, human translation of their promotional materials. After all, we said Google’s Serbian English translation was good, but it’s not THAT good! In fact it’s not nearly good enough.

Perhaps in a future article we will also take a look at some of the differences between machine translation and human translation and investigate some of the reasons why, despite the remarkable advances, and the positive things we have said about Google Translate, automatic translation software is not currently a serious choice for professional translation – from Serbian to English or in any other language combination – and why it may never be. Indeed, we have some deep concerns about possible misuses of a tool like this, in an environment where even now translation is often not taken seriously enough.

In the meantime though, check out the tool and perhaps open up a whole new world of translated Serbian web content that you could not access before! Try Google Serbian-English and English-Serbian translation here.

How to Use Google Analytics Website Optimizer to Get a Better Conversion Rate and ROI Online Pages

With the World Wide Web becoming a jumble of web pages and hyper text markup language, e-marketers, or online marketers need to become even more analytically suave at the micro level in order to achieve online business success. Google’s website optimizer is a must use in today’s over competitive world of web clicks.

The first thing that you want to do is make sure that your website looks clean and crisp. Also, make sure that that important information is included above the page fold (the area of the web page that is visible when a user loads the page). Info that gives the visitor a reason to stay, purchase business products (the online shopping cart), download information, fill out an interest form, or purchase services should be clearly laid out above the page fold. As a web site owner it’s also important to think about repeat business, and include a newsletter or email subscription prominently on the home page. To get started, Feedburner is a free email subscription tool and is a great way to get started. This tool includes free statistics as well including page views and unique (your web site reach) visitors.

Any of these desired actions that are performed on your website are known as conversions in the Google online marketing world. With the Google website optimizer, you can perform two types of testing. A/B split tests and Multivariate testing. A/V Google optimizer is best used when your website gets a low amount of traffic. It’s also best used when you are testing different web pages, or want to move things around on that web page.

Multivariate testing is different than A/B testing. It is used for testing on different locations within a web page. It’s best used when there is high traffic on that particular website page. Also, its optimal use is when you want to test multiple locations at the same time on a web site page.

With multivariate testing, you’ll first want to identify and tag which links that you want to test and the goal for those links. Next you’ll need to follow the installation guide after you click on the Google website optimizer tab. In this process, you’ll be implementing variations and implementing code for your net marketing analysis needs. The website optimizer will automatically create different variations for the usage of your test pages. Use the preview feature to see how these variations will look before you run it live on your website. After you’re done previewing, you can run your experiment. You’ll want to periodically analyze your results to make sure that they are effective. Another feature that is available is that you will be able to copy the experiment if you want to run it again and see results.

The Google multivariate test will show reports including data that will show how the percentage of conversions has changed since the variations and combinations were added. Implementing the Google website optimizer is a granular way of tracking how a web page is performing and will help to optimize conversions, Return on Investment (ROI calculated by profit divided costs), and help gain customer loyalty.

Using Google Alerts to Help Your Business

At times it seems that Google releases more new products and services than we can keep track of. From Google Calendar and Google Video, to Google Base, Google Finance, and Google Trends, it can be overwhelming just to remember what each one does. One of the oft overlooked hidden gems in Google’s enormous offering is Google Alerts. Within minutes, one can be signed up for email alerts that can give them and their business a leg up on the competition. Alerts can be used to spy on competitors, keep track of what people are saying about your business, or follow an important news story.

How Does It Work

Google Alerts sends you an email each time a new page for your chosen term makes it in the top twenty results on Google’s web search. You can also have the alert check Google News and/or Google Groups. To sign up for a Google Alert, all that you need to do is visit the Google Alerts homepage (http://www.google.com/alerts), enter the search term, type of alert (search Google News, Google Groups, or the web), frequency of emails (daily, as it happens, or weekly), and your email address. You can set up alerts for as many terms as you like using a Google Account. So why would you want an unlimited amount of alerts? Because as a business owner, you have a lot to keep track of and very limited time to do it.

Spy on Your Competitors

Every business has a competitor. More likely, you have several direct competitors and several more indirect competitors. While regularly checking out their websites is an important part of the process, it doesn’t paint the whole picture. A competitor’s website is very much crafted to the image that they want to portray to their customers. This is great if you want to know what their latest sale is or how much their new product costs, but it isn’t likely to feature a negative review in last Sunday’s newspaper.

That’s where Google Alerts comes in. By simply setting up a News, Groups, and search alert for each of your competitors, you will know what other people are saying about your competition – both the media and consumers, both good and bad.

Keep Up To Date on Your Industry

Equally as important as what people are saying about your competition is what people are saying about your industry in general. If there’s a negative PR swing against violent video games, and you just happen to run a video game store, you will probably be affected. By receiving alerts on important key words related to your industry, you can be on top of any sudden changes and react accordingly. By the time your competition realizes what’s happening they will be scrambling to catch up to you.

Track Yourself and Your Business

It goes without saying, if it’s important to know what people are saying about your competitors and about your industry, it would stand to reason that it’s important to know what people are saying about you. I have Google Alerts on both my name and my businesses name. I know that they go hand in hand – if one is getting slandered you better bet it will hurt the other. By receiving alerts, you can be on top of anything negative relating to you or your business, and hopefully nip any problem in the bud before it grows too large. On the flip side, there’s nothing better than receiving an alert where someone praises your business. Those are the types of things that you want to make sure are on the PR page of your businesses website.

Get News Stories for Your Site or Blog

I own a site where I do weekly news updates about what’s going on in the industry. Some weeks, there are tons of news items to choose from, other weeks it’s hard to find anything. In addition to the regular industry news sites that I check to get information, I have Google Alerts set up for each of the key terms. You’d be surprised how frequently a unique story from a local newspaper pops up in Google News. Many times these stories haven’t been seen by my competitors and I am able to “break” the news to the online community. This works well for blogs too – if you have a daily blog about being an entrepreneur, having an alert for the word “entrepreneur” can fetch you several quality stories each day to help inspire fresh posts.

In this increasingly competitive business world, you need each and every leg up on your competition that you can get. Used properly, Google Alerts can be an extremely efficient way to track what’s going on across the web. The alternative would be to search each term every day for new updates. Who has time for that? Spending less time researching enables you to spend more time on the things important to your business.

Google Secrets to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing

Now that you have seen the Keyword Research Tool, we can discuss the importance and role of keywords to the level of your achievement. It is also important to decide on a niche, so you know which direction to take. Direction is so much more important than speed because 97% of affiliate marketers are going nowhere fast. The only difference is that the 3% built their Online Empire with Keywords as the foundation. You are looking for keywords with a high search volume and a low competition within your niche.

There are three kinds of Primary Keyword Research Steps known as;

Short Tail Keywords – Are single keywords and often referred to as Primary Keywords. These are the keywords that you want present in your domain name, but be objective and precise. Let’s use the Dieting Niche for demonstration. Good Short tail keywords will then be Health, Diet and Weight. These three particular keywords get searched around 982,000 times on Google Per Month. That’s almost a Million Searches, can you see where this keyword thing is going?

Long Tail Keywords – These are normally no more than Three Keywords making up a Keyword Phrase. Within the Niche we’re using for demonstration, lose weight, losing weight, lose weight fast, and fast weight loss are excellent Long Tail Keywords. They are searched around 564,100 times on Google Per Month. But you will have to research the keywords relevant to your niche, which means your results will be different. Long Tail Keywords are being used in your Site, and Posts Title. It works really well if the Long and Short tail Keywords are combined.

Anchor Text – These are Longer Keyword Phrases and refer to the phrase someone will type into their browser to search a specific interest. The kind of search someone would enter when they are much more likely to buy. For this demonstration, how to lose weight, how to lose weight fast, and want to lose weight are great examples. Anchor text is what must be present on your site’s home page, the Google Spider love seeing this and it helps with ranking. These anchor texts are searched 852,300 times on Google Per Month. Now combine the results of the three tests we’ve just done.

Yes, 2,398, 400 Searches on Google Per Month for the three search categories combined. By now you must realize the potential of proper keyword research, and why the 3% get to make those disgusting amounts of money online! This article will Simplify the Basics of SEO, what to include in Headers with Titles and even Categories, Tag Lines and Single tags. There is also the Site Map within Google Search Console.

Identifying the H1 Heading – May sometimes also be a Post or Blog Page Title but this usually refer to the Blog, Site or Video Title. The H1 Heading is where you include the Primary Search Phrases you wish your Site or Video to Rank for in Google within 15 – 65 Characters. It is important to preferably keep the H1 Heading within 60 Characters, because the H1 Heading will appear at the top in Google Search Result pages. Make the H1 Heading both Easy to Read and to Remember.

Identifying the H2 Heading – This is usually the Blog Post Title and once again the desired Search Phrases and Keywords need to populate this Heading. Numbers play a huge role with H2 Headings, and strangely enough uneven numbers have a more striking effect, combine this with a “Reason Why” kind of suggestion and you have a winner H2 Heading.

Identifying the H3 Header – Post Titles often also make up the H3 Header, along with Widget Descriptions within the Blog Side Bar. When you use the Text Widget to load HTML code, then the “Alt=” Attribute usually appear as an H3 Header.

A Blog post Title also appears as an H3 Header when you use an SEO Plugin like “All in One SEO Tools” and your Blog Post Title appears after the forward slash (/) to the Primary Domain. Using an SEO Plugin will allow you to submit all your individual pages, posts, tags and categories as individual site maps.

Identifying the H4 Header – This can be defined as something like the Tagline to you Blog Title Tag or H1 header. A Logo image is also often accepted as an H4 header within certain Plugins which may display a logo icon.

The Site Map Description – Your Blog Site Map is extremely important, and for this you simply install the Plugin “Google XML Site Maps”. This Plugin will share an updated your Blog Site Map to the Google Search Console each time you make changes, but the changes may take a while (Normally 2 – 3 Weeks) to show up in Search Results.

It is however important to manually check for the Site Map Acceptance from inside the Google Search Console, even with the Google Site Maps Plugin Activated. There may be times when certain errors occur with your Blog Site Map inside Google, which means Google cannot find your Blog.

You have to then test the site map with the tools provided from within the Google Search Console, fix the errors found from inside your Blog C-Panel and test the Site Map again. When the results return with Zero errors found, you simply delete the old site map and upload the new site map.

Accessing the Google Search Console you will need a Google account, as with all the Free Tools Google gives you and it’s a Lot. You simply need to look in the right places and then take your time getting to know how to use the tools. Simple Search your Browser (Preferably Chrome) for the search phrase “Google Search Console” and simply follow the instructions after opening the link on the search result page.

The Blog Site Map is what Search Engine Spiders use to Crawl your Blog so it can be categorized correctly, sending the right visitors your way. This is why the presence of Keywords and Search Phrases are so important throughout all content on your Blog, just the right ones in the right positions.

The Value of Google Places for Local Business and Map Ranking Factors

So as search engine marketers, we all know the value of Google’s local 10 pack, 7 pack, 3 pack, whatever you want to call it. But just how valuable is it and what are the factors that search engines use to determine local ranking? This is all what we will talk about in today’s entry.

For those of you who may not know me yet, my name is Matt Parks. I’m an online marketing consultant who helps small, medium and even global companies build appropriate online marketing strategies and enhance their brand awareness through competitive traditional and non-traditional advertising techniques.

Now for what you’ve been waiting for… the good stuff…

So, you may ask… Just how valuable are the local map results for my company? Well there is no simple answer to that question. Each company should have a custom built strategy. For instance, if you own a local Thai restaurant and want to increase your daily foot traffic, local listings will greatly help your efforts. On the other hand, you own a specialty shoe store that does 100% of your business online, local listings are just not for you. Google and other search engines developed their local results pages to assist users in finding small business owners with brick and mortar shops, retail stores or restaurants, and get quick information about them – such as hours, short reviews and even menu items and sale dates.

So, we’ve whittled a few of you out of the mix now. What’s next? How do I get premium ranking with these listings?

Ahhhhh. So you want to know the magic trick huh? Well, first you need to have a listing. You can create one by logging into your Google account if you have one, and selecting the local business center icon under your settings. If you don’t have one there, just type into Google: “local business center” and follow the easy to use, step by step listing creation wizard. When creating your listing, it is very important to make sure all the information you provide is correct, including phone number and address as before you finish, you will be required to verify by telephone or snail mail that in fact the listing is yours. Now on to the pot of gold. Lets go over the top ten ranking factors for local listings…

1: GENERAL IMPORTANCE OF CLAIMING LOCAL BUSINESS LISTING – You have to have a listing first.

2: LOCAL BUSINESS LISTING ADDRESS IN CITY OF SEARCH – The closer you are to the IP, the better.

3: ASSOCIATING LOCAL BUSINESS LISTING WITH PROPER CATEGORIES – This is a must, create new categories if you need to, just don’t try and keyword stuff.

4: PRODUCT / SERVICE KEYWORD IN LOCAL BUSINESS LISTING TITLE – Use your correct full name, but add a keyword if it fits right. ie: Garden Palace – Chinese Restaurant

5: PROXIMITY OF ADDRESS TO CITY CENTROID – Don’t use a fake address, but if you are corporate, a UPS box (no P.O. box, only physical address) near the middle of town couldn’t hurt

6: PRODUCT/SERVICE KEYWORDS IN LOCAL BUSINESS LISTING DESCRIPTION – Keep it short and sweet.. Remember, you are trying to appeal to the user/searcher.

7: LOCATION KEYWORD IN LOCAL BUSINESS LISTING TITLE/DESCRIPTION – Garden Palace of Nashville – Chinese Restaurant

8: ASSOCIATING PHOTOS/VIDEOS WITH THE LOCAL BUSINESS LISTING – Not as important, but try and at least upload a logo.

9: PRODUCT / SERVICE IN LOCAL BUSINESS LISTING CUSTOM FIELDS – Undetermined how much this helps, but they are provided, so use them… But don’t OVERUSE them and stuff em’ full of keywords.

10: ASSOCIATING LOCAL AREA CODE AS PRIMARY LOCAL BUSINESS LISTING NUMBER – Local numbers perform much better, may not help with ranking, but it does with consumer trust.

An extra bonus: Make sure information in your listing is consistent across the board.. ie: YellowPages.com, CitySearch.com, etc. as Google uses these Data Sources to add trustworthiness to your listing and gives you ranking bonuses due to it being more “relevant”.

Well that’s about it.