Gmail continues marketing push

February 23rd, 2007

As Chris mentioned last week Gmail have been really pushing the awareness boat out recently. Google have got their own “official” YouTube account which they have been posting videos on, including “The Gmail Theatre” which gives you four puppet explained reasons to use Gmail.

This, along with Google’s launch of Premier Apps really marks a change in Google’s strategy - they aggresively trying to hussle MS into a corner and grab some of the Office market share.

Google banned - More than just index removal

February 22nd, 2007

Almost a whole year ago, I wrote about the events management website coole.co.uk. They have been busted by Matt Cutts for stuffing a whole load of keyword stuffed, hidden text on their website, for which they were removed from the Google index.

I thought I’d check back on them last night and see if they’d sorted their act out yet. They’ve had a bit of a redesign and have removed the hidden text, but they are still not in the Google index. The interesting thing is, they have a Google Coop search box on their homepage and when I tried to perform a search, I got this:

“Unfortunately, the site violates our terms of service so your search could not be completed.” So I guess this means, if you break Google’s terms of service, not only are you removed from their index, but you are unable to use their services! No search boxes, no adsense, no maps.

Becoming reliant on the ever increasing array of Google services means a greater loss if you break the rules. So play nice

Did Google kill Anna Nicole Smith?

February 21st, 2007

The bodyguard who tried to revive Anna Nicole Smith in her hotel room has spoken out for the first time, telling the New York Post that Smith was becoming extremely depressed during the last days of her life.

“She always had a laptop and she Googled her name, and she would read these articles that spoke badly about her,” said the bodyguard, who goes by the name of Big Moe. “She was just, was sad about that.”

Moe said he was especially worried about Smith during her final four days in Florida, because her baby daughter Dannielynn was in the Bahamas and not around to cheer her up.

Although I’d expect all of us have done a vanity search on Google at least once for our own name, how would you feel if all you could see on the front page was negative stories about yourself?

That brings me to thinking that what would happen if a top result from Google was a page slandering you - could Google be legally asked to remove that page from their results if you can’t get in contact with the original site? I’d doubt it, and don’t think that they *should* be held responsible for their search results (Come on Germany/China, stop trying to censor the net!), but can you imagine how frustrating and upsetting it would be to have untrue things said about you which are shown to anyone interested in searching for you?

I think that would help push any unstable person over the edge.

Google Images back to its old self

February 21st, 2007

Someone at Google obviously pays great attention to our blog, not a week after I posted about the poor Google Images change, Google Blogoscoped reports that Google have change back to their old format.

Guess I’ll have to find something else to gripe about, then

All hail long tail

February 21st, 2007

Everyone knows that putting all your eggs in one basket is a risky business. One mistake or change and your whole business is gone. Its the same case with search. Clients always come to us with a definitive list of key words and terms that they want to be first for. Its usually one or two big terms that they assume are going to bring in the majority of their traffic. This, however is not always the case.

A company we have just started working with, lockwoodhume office furniture sell office desks, chairs and other furniture. Their main key term “office furniture” for example is quite a competitive term which may take time to rank for. To stop putting all their eggs in one basket what is the alternative? Long tail.

In the short term long tail terms are going to produce much quicker results than the main terms and even though you may only get a couple of visits per day, per term, you may have hundreds or even thousands of niche long tail terms you can rank for. In some cases this can account for 50% or more of a websites traffic!

Another example that we are just starting to work for is Travelcover travel insurance. Their main term is going to be “Travel insurance” which is a very highly competitive key term and will take a long time to start ranking well for. In this case long tail terms are going to be essential to get the site ranked and start building traffic and natural links.

Here are some excellent tools to find long tail terms:

www.hittail.com
Excellent long tail suggestion service based on incoming query searches and related terms.

Google keyword selector
The old classic! Use Google’s own tool to find long tail search volumes and competitiveness for your given terms

Google Analytics
If you haven’t already got an analytics account - GET ONE! With huge amounts of information about search terms and a recommended search terms it is an essential tool for any website.