Archive for the ‘google’ Category

If  Simon Cowell has the X-factor, why doesn’t he have an official blog to call his own? Or maybe he does but it just doesn’t show up on the first page of Google.

I was looking for Simon’s official blog today and low and behold, there isn’t one. Punching Simon Cowell into Google (maybe not the best verb to start a sentence with for those who may be skim reading this bit)  brought up the following results:

Take a quick scan of the first page results on Google. Here’s my point, many celebs have their own websites or blogs so they can convey there own image and message online, so they can show balanced opinions and views about themselves to other people. We can see that Piers Morgan is sponging of Simon Cowells X-factor status via Google News. Not much you can do about that, but Simon doesn’t appear to have his own official blog or if he does, it’s not good enough to appear on the first page. The first real blog site to show up is basically a fan site, not an official Simon Cowell version;www.simoncowell.org. I’m sure Simon would like to counter some of the written content and  opinions about him.

I know Simon is predominantly in the news and every man and his dog wants a piece of him (even Gordon Brown realises that he could be shunted aside if he decides to put his name forward as an independant candidate at the next election), but in a few years when Simon has been relegated to obscurity to the lesser known channels, he may have to rely on his blog to let the world know what he’s up to.

On Page SEO needs the X-Factor

There are a few simple rules to look our for when optimising an article on a blog and making it search engine friendly so it will rank high in the SERPS.

Step 1: Choose your title tag carefully and ensure it has the keyword phrase with in it

Step 2: Configure your on page headers correctly with H1, H2 & H3 headers

Step 3: And the description tag? This isn’t really a step as Google doesn’t rank your pages using the description tag – it never really did give it much weight. Some other search engines do still use it as a ranking factor.

Step 4: Write atleast 750 words and use synonyms –  the more words for the search engines  the better, but be careful not to keyword spam.

Step 5: Ensure you have an RSS news feed so your subscriptions get ll the updates immediately. If you don’t have an existing audience to speak of, bookmark it yourself to give it some link juice.

Step 6: Link the article from the home page to give it some PR weight.

Step 7: Make it interesting and valuable to the potential readership. Include images to illustrate your points.

Reputation Management is an SEO service that enables you to take control of the top results and attenuate the negative remarks/comments that people may write about your company or you personally.  This can some times have irrepairable damage to your brand or name.  You can plan for this before it is too late, by carrying out a targeted SEO campaign on your brand name and dominating the search engine results, before anyone else does.

“It’s easy for Simon to shut people up on his shows, he normally just raises his hand, but there is no equivalent oral straight jacket for the search engines.”

Maybe Mr Cowell isn’t bothered about running his own blog – he orchestrates his ideals and news through the media, but when he gets voted off the telly, and has to rely on the internet to spread his message, he may need a blog that ranks higher than any un-official fan site, relaying bad press on him.

I personally think Simon is a fair bloke, so if Simon is ever on the look out for a professional SEO company with the X-factor, then Rankability are here to help, and I would be happy to give him a discount for sponsoring Rankability on his T-shirt for a week.

What is Google Wave? It’s a plethora of superb features and on the surface, Google wave looks like a great product.

Google’s anticipated real-time communication software launches today. How ever you must be invited to Google Wave in order to use it.

The difference with this product is that it is open source. Google want help completing the development of Google Wave as it’s currently in beta and on the Google sand box platform.

Google wave is seen as a communication and collaboration tool that basically hosts objects that contain conversations between many people. Unlike email it is real time and dynamic in the way that it stores and sends messages. A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time. It can has a real time spell check, play back facility so you can play back previous conversations. You can embed waves onto your web pages using the Google Wave APi, which based on the previous Google Math API. A wave can also be embedded into a blog using the API’s, which includes all the UI and messages. You can follow a conversation from many sources and theres no need to go to each of our sites – it can all be viewed in the wave client. It looks genius!

The embed API can also intereact with other social media sites. The Google demo uses Orchid where you can embed and create a new wave on Orchid. You can also use your social media contacts in Orchid aswell as yoru wave contacts. You can also embed a search panel so you can search for contacts and conversations. Wave is of course mobile where you can interact with your waves remotely using your mobile phone.

There is only one copy of the wave at any one time.  So editing the wave is easy; you can edit say image captions which also then propogates the changes on blogs etc.  Other people can also edit your waves which can be usefull for say collaboration on meeting notes between a number of people. Changes to text and messages are marked up in a different colour so you can see each others edits. By default everyone can edit the wave, but when something is changed the author is notified and everyone can see who changed what.

This makes for a very powerfull collaboration tool. How can this be applied to a document?  Well waves can be cleverly used in the editing and production of a document and this also has playback where you will be able to manipulate the entire history of the wave. Once a document is completed, you can hide and show discussions. More features are promised in the final cut of the wave product for document collaboration with the ability to merge waves and documents.

A clever thing is how wave allows multiple people to transmit messages, edit documents at the same time in real time. This is really concurrent editing.

So, Google wave! Will it catch on and be a big hit amongst the online masses or just a specialised tool for the few? Let’s wait and see – I’ll let you know after a few weeks of use. I’ll keep you posted!