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How RedBull Gave Google SuperSonic Wings!

admin — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:09:03 +0000

Saturday morning I ran out of my favorite organic hazelnut flavored coconut milk creamer and decided that was a sign to stop drinking coffee all together. I’m usually only a one cup a day coffee drinker so it’s not like I’m giving up chocolate or anything but it’s taken a couple of days to adjust my morning routine to not be coffee focused. I’m hoping that by next Saturday my body will have adjusted accordingly. In the meantime I’m surprised by how much time and energy I’ve spent thinking about coffee and caffeine. Thus the caffeine oriented post for you today. Hope you enjoy!

Since you don’t have coffee on the brain you might not have noticed how much faster and relevant your Google searches have become in the last few months. So I thought I’d share with you what’s going on behind the scenes so that you can include a few more search engine optimization strategies in your marketing portfolio.

Since July 2010, Google has been using their new site indexing platform called Caffeine! See what they say about their old vs. new system:

Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

Web searches should now be 50% fresher. What does this mean for you? It’s time to step up content development (that means more blogging) and your social media creativity to stay ahead of the competition and stay as relevant as possible to your prospects and customers.

Are you up for the challenge? Did you notice any fresher results when Google searching? Please leave your comments below.

Want More Free Exposure on Google?

christina — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 08:00:46 +0000

Have you heard of ‘Google Places’ or ‘Google Local Business Center?’ Any business whether local or online can add their business listing to Google Places for FREE. What does this mean? That when someone searches for your product or service in Google you can customize the information that is given from Google about your business.

You can enhance your listing by adding up to 10 photos, 5 videos, coupons and even real-time updates like weekly specials. There is even a reporting feature that will let you see where customers come from and what they are searching for to find you.

To start creating your free listing, go to Google Places and sign in with your Google account. If you don’t already have a Google account, click Sign up now to create a new Google account. You can also use an AdWords login and password, if you have one.

More Benefits for Your Google Profile

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:00:10 +0000

We all want to make sure that whatever comes up on the 1st page of Google when you Google your name is something flattering and possibly help to further build your business. Setting a Google Profile will create at least one more item that will show on the 1st page of Google that you control the content on. Other benefits to setting up a profile include:

You can link to your blog, website, Twitter, Facebook or any other place you want to direct people to
Your profile page can be your main page if you don’t have a website or if you own your own name.com but haven’t investing in building out a website you can redirect it to your Google profile.

If you haven’t set up a Google Profile for yourself then now is the time. Head over to Google Profile after reading this post and “get ‘er done”. Feel free to share your profile link in the comments below.

Google Alerts for Speakers, Authors and Coaches

admin — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:00:16 +0000

If you wanting to brand yourself in any way then its important to stay aware of what is being said or written about you. Google Alerts helps with this task. Here is a list of things you should set up alerts for:

your name
your twitter id
your company name
your blogs name
your product names
your employees or clients names
your clients companies
your competitors
your competitors’ company name
your competitors’ products
industry news
industry blogs
industry keywords

When tracking industry keywords think about using this content for future blog posts, articles or newsletters. It helps to use advanced search operators to help you narrow your searches.

For example if you were a commercial Realtor in Miami then you might want to create an alert for [Commercial Real Estate+Miami] so that you got information only about Commercial Real Estate in Miami. You’ll have to play with this feature a bit but after a few tweaks it can prove to be VERY powerful information.