Back in May of 2009, Google launched Search Options, which is the side panel that lets you apply filters and view search results in different ways. This might not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but Google actually put in quite a few long years into the development of this technology. The concept surfaced in 2001 and was later unveiled in May of 2007 as universal search. Fast forward two years, and today we have very enhanced and beefed up search options available at only a few mouse clicks away.
So you may be wondering what can you do with the new search options. The simple answer: a lot! The better question to ask would be what can’t you do with the new search options. The more important question to ask yourself – assuming you’re a site owner interested in increasing organic search traffic – is how can I enhance my SEO to capitalize on these new features. Let’s look at a few of the new features and then I’ll offer some suggestions on how to take advantage of them.
The search options available are as follows: All results, videos, news, blogs, books, forums, reviews.
Additionally, you can add these filters to the first six: Any time, recent results, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year, specific date range.
On top of that, you can then filter your view: Standard view, related searches, wonder wheel, and timeline.
The last filter allows you to change your view even further: Standard results, images from the page, fewer shopping sites, more shopping sites, and more text.
So now that we’ve broken down the search options and defined each filter, let’s talk about some SEO tips. Here are a few things that you can do to make the most of the new search options in Google.
Videos: Creating and uploading a videos in YouTube and embedding them in your web pages will increase your chances of pulling up in the video results.
On video sites, such as YouTube, be sure to put the URL of your web page into the description. People as well as spiders will be able to travel from the YouTube video page to your web page. Both activities influence your web pages rankings.
Blogs: Creating and maintaining a blog, and publishing unique and high quality content related to your brand, business, products, and services can help you increase your chances gaining top ranks when users filter and show blog results only.
Don’t discount the possibility of running multiple blogs. The cost and time invested into maintaining blogs is much less than most people believe. Also, I recommend running blogs using multiple platforms. For example, you should have a blog on self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and LiveJournal. Lastly, I suggest that each blog appear independent and seperate from the others.
The most successful blogs are blogs that grow off the reader’s activity and contributions. Try to write content in a way that captures attention and makes readers feel compelled to take an action. The desireable actions you seek are backlinks, comments, and social network sharing. These are all activities that influence how well your blog post ranks for keyword phrases in search. Also, content can be carefully shaped and molded in a way to attract the attention of people as well as search engines. And that leads to my next tip.
Reviews: Adjusting your writing style can influence your chances of ranking in the reviews only section. Google looks for common writen trends that typically reflect written reviews, such as product reviews. Spend some time studying the content on some of the pages found in the search results and adapt some of their style into yours.
Index Frequency: You should constantly monitor how quickly new content gets indexed from your site. If content gets indexed within a few minutes of publishing, then you should take advantage of that and publish more content. I recommend publishing new content immediately after the most recent content has been indexed. In other words, everytime web crawlers come back to your site, you should have new content ready to be crawled for indexing. Doing so will increase your chances of pulling up in after the past hour, past 24 hours, and past week filter has been applied.
Another obvious reason why I recommend posting new content as frequently as possible is because doing so places your mark in hundreds and in many cases thousands of search result pages. A great pioneer in this strategy is Chris Pirillo. He has multiple blogs, forums, and sites, each being updated almost hourly. Secondly, these updates aren’t done just by hired or team writers. Most of the updates are user generated content. Chris Pirillo’s earns revenue by displaying contextual advertisements off the content created by community members within his network.
Adjusting how you do things and puting yourself more in-line, and in the same direction as Google, can make a significant difference in the amount of organic search traffic your site receives. Just being aware and perceptive of how Google presents information to users via their search results alone can help a lot. And with these new search options available, instantly there is a new resource of traffic that you can be tapping into.
The last week in September, I wrote an article expressing some opinions about Google Sidewiki. One of the concerns I had with Google Sidewiki was the fact that users couldn’t claim “indexable ownership” of their content. Instead, content contributed in Google Sidewiki would be left for hackers, and other splog owners to tap into.
Being a blogger myself, at that time, I had no interest in using Google Sidewiki. The reason is simple. If I am going to invest time into contributing my thoughts into words, then I am only going to do that in a way that allows me to maintain control of my content and possibly even make money off it. In other words, instead of investing an hour of time into making a Google Sidewiki comment about another web page, I’d much rather publish the write-up on my blog, add a little SEO flavor to the content, slap some AdSense on the page, and make about $25 / year off my writing.
I am not sure what happened or why, but Google Sidewiki now offers the option to pipe your comments directly into your Blogger.com blog. In my opinion, this corrects everything, and instantly changes my mind about contributing and using Google Sidewiki. This new feature actually excites me simply because I am not able to spin off content on my blog easier than before. New article content can be published on my blog directly from Google Sidewiki. When the comment is published on the blog, a reference to the web page and the Sidewiki page are automatically included in the footnotes of the article.
Another feature I enjoy about Google Sidewiki is the fact that you can leave a welcome comment on pages that you own. The opening comment will remain on the top of the Sidewiki page, and the owner has the option of editing and or deleting the comment if desired. This feature gives site owners, such as bloggers, an excellent opportunity to welcome readers to their site.
The sharing features in Google Sidewiki are very helpful and useful. I’ll admit, when I wrote my first article about Google Sidewiki, I was so bothered by many things that I didn’t have a clear vision on a lot of the good things. The sharing capabilities are great. After publishing a comment, users can share what they wrote on FaceBook, Twitter, and by Email.
I hope to see additional sharing features in the near future; however, I am very pleased with the ones being offered. Frankly, FaceBook and Twitter are my two favorites, plus if I am batching my comments to my Blogger.com blog, I have additional sharing features available there.
That said, I’ll admit, I jumped the gun when I published my last article; however, I do feel my opinions regarding web spam and content theft are valid. Bloggers typically don’t like to contribute content in areas where they lose control of it or the ability to monetize it. With Google making the decision to allow people to pipe their comments directly into their blogs, this makes thing so much more appealing. At least it does for me. And don’t be surprised when you run across a few of my comments in Sidewiki. Also, and don’t be surprised if the post you’re reading on my blog was actually a post written within Sidewiki. And lastly, don’t be surprised if that post was written about you.
Even today with the Internet reaching balzing speeds, loading media rich web pages can still take a lot of time. Most modern news sites include high resolution videos, detailed screen shots, and streaming audio on their pages. This makes load time slow, even for users with the highest Internet speeds. Google claims that users need a way to flip web pages similiar to how people flip pages in a magazine or newspaper. Their goal is to completely eliminate load time all together with the addition of a new Google Labs experiment called Google Fast Flip.
On the Official Google blog, they explained that Fast Flip is an experiment where people can combine traditional print reading with online article reading to achieve a new and enhanced reading experience. Just like when people read printed magazines or newspapers, Fast Flip lets users browse through multiple pages quickly and instantly. Information is sorted and presented to users by their level of popularity, topic, and source. In other words, a user can use filters to display only news from one or multiple sources. Also, filters can be used to display information about certain topics.
Online Video Presentation of Google Fast Flip Created by Phillip J Rhoades.
In part of building Fast Flip, Google developed partnerships with three dozen top publishers including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica and Newsweek. These companies will all share revenue earned from contextually relevent ads. Google aims to support the publishing industry with the many challenges they face. Google believes that Fast Flip can help encourage users to continue reading news.
Google recognizes that people are using mobile devices to get news and updates on current events. Because of that, they have developed a mobile version of Fast Flip. The mobile version is available for iPhone and Android devices and is accessible simply by navigating directly to the Google Fast Flip homepage. Viewing the mobile version gives access to popular articles, sources, and topics. Flipping through articles is done by swipping a finger over the page to the left or right. Users are able to tap to zoom an article to view a cleaner high resolution version.
I think Google Fast Flip is useful. Like many of the Google Labs experiments, I don’t think Google does a good job promoting it. At the time of writing this article, I wasn’t able to find an official Google video on Fast Flip, thus the reason why I included the video created by Phillip J Rhoades. That said, Google does an amazing job with creating things that makes lives easier for people. The problemi is that many people don’t know about it. I recommend that people read as many Google blogs as possible so that they can stay in the loop with what’s going on.
I have had a strong interest in Google Wave since May when it was unveiled. In fact, I wrote about Google Wave last month here on SeoHosting.com. At any rate, very early on, I had submitted my name and email address to use Google Wave. I just discovered that tomorrow Google will be issuing out over 100,000 invites. I hope that my name is pulled from this hat, because I will be very excited to use Google Wave.
Google Wave is an online tool used for real-time communication and collaboration among multiple people across the Internet that allows for simultaneous discussion and editing of rich formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. The wave is an equally a discussion as well as a document.
Users in the wave can communicate and work together at the same time. The reason why is because a wave is shared among users. A participant can reply or add remarks to a document, edit the contnet, and even add more people into the wave.
To keep things organized among users, a main feed playback is available so that others new into the wave can review the timeline. Another element is that a wave is always live. Even to the point where you can visibly see another user’s keystrokes as they’re being typed.
Google Wave will soon be used for blogging, wikis, message boards, traditional email, and even instant messenging. With Google Wave, all these older technologies will become mashed up into one. That said, Google Wave is not available to the general public. And tomorrow, over 100,000 people will receive an invite to use Google Wave.
I hope that my name is pulled from the hat. If you want to get your name pulled from the hat and score an invite to use Google Wave, I suggest that you watch the video presentation recorded back in May and then register your name and email address. Google Wave is something that you’re not going to want to miss out on. It’s powerful and it’s sure to change how people communicate and do things together online.
In addition to the official blog, Google has a lot of other blogs they maintain. For a long time I’ve been wondering how many blogs they operated. I have RSS subscriptions to a few of them, but every day it seems like a new blog surfaces. And that’s ok, but it’s just a little difficult to keep up. However, if you’re interested in learning more about Google and keeping up with what’s going on, reading and discovering as many of their blogs is important. That said, here are a few of the Google blogs that I enjoy reading.
First one is obvious, it’s the main blog. Everyone should read and subscribe to The Official Google Blog. This blog does a great job at bringing forward some of the most eventful news pertaining to Google. It acts as the main channel and many times is used to tell people about the many other secondary channels of communication available.
The next blog I recommend reading and subscribing to the Google Webmaster Central Blog. This blog is essential to read if you’re trying to keep up to speed with Goolge SEO. In fact, I wrote and published an article on SeoHosting.com yesterday based of information discovered on Google Webmaster Central.
Are you crazy about Mac Computers? If so, then Google wants to engage with you on their official Google Mac Blog. On the Google Mac Blog you can keep up news about Mac computers and even learn about and download Google software specifically made for Mac computers. All in all, if you enjoy Google and Mac computers, subscribing to the Official Google Mac Blog is a must.
Another blog that I place a lot of value in is the Google Online Security Blog. This blog keeps people up to date and provides them with breaking news regarding viruses and online security. This blog provides information such as how to improve browser security, which then points to their Browser Secuirty HandBook, and the Top 10 Malware Sites. You can’t go wrong with subscribing to this blog. The information published is geared towards helping keep your online experience more secure.
To learn about all of Google’s blogs, they have a complete Google Blog Directory available. The directory is broken down into five sections: Google-wide, Product, Ads, Developer, and Region. You can easily search their directory to find additional blogs that interest you. The more blogs that you subscribe to, obviously the more you can learn about Google.
In addition to the Google Blog Directory, Google has made reading their entire line up of blogs easy by also creating a very handy iGoogle Gadget and Tab for your personalized iGoogle homepage.
What Google blogs do you enjoy reading and why? Share these blogs in the comments below.
P.S. What kind of SEO articles do you like to read? Contact Me with your article ideas.
