Well… not exactly. But it’s very similar. Just better. And just intranets… umm, yeah, not really like Squidoo then.

Ok, for those of you who don’t know about what I just said, let me explain. Squidoo is a place where you can make “lenses” (webpages) and fill them up with content about something. And that means you can spam all you want, but what they meant by it was to create a sort of wiki service, just not centralized. Basically you have control over what you put on that page, and it was used by spamming SEOs to get link-juice for their websites, since Squidoo was quite PR-intensive. However, a few months ago, Squidoo was “slapped” by Google, thereby ejecting from its index a large number of those sites.

Fast-forward to present day, and you see Google has acquired JotSpot (yeah, i had no idea who they were either) and basically gone and done the same but for intranets. What this means is they have now bought and integrated a system of wiki-websites, where you can post content for anyone who may be interested. Also, you get full integration with a Google Custom Search system, and in their example, you can search for employees who interest you, etc.

How you use this is through Google Apps. Again, for the uninitiated, Google Apps is a very interesting Google service which allows you to build your own environment filled with Google goodies (gmail for your domain - like I use contact@eydryan.com , calendar, docs, iGoogle, etc.), and the fun thing is that you can brand it with your logos and really make it feel like home. While to the normal user this may not be that much, to a company, small as it may be, this is a great thing, since you always needed a place to keep/ back up documents etc.

The latest addition, Google sites, is an interesting thing since I’ve actually learned about this in Business Quality Management, where we discussed the utility of a company forum, where people can post problems and solutions, search for expertise, etc (and it was a case study about a little company called… Honda). There we talked about how that can help people, without having to go through a lengthy process of contacting the right department etc. Also, there was the mentioning of various websites for each employee, where he would put solutions to problems he had encountered for others to see them and get solutions quickly. The problem with those however, was that they were rarely updated and no one knew how to find them.

Google tries to solve some of those problems, but what it’s basically doing is helping everyone adopt that system. I remember that for that case study however, I was completely against both the forum and the mini-sites and I’ll tell you why. The forum is indeed a centralized and unified space, easily searchable and somewhat easy to navigate through (topic categories and sub-categories can be a hassle and many people don’t know where to post), but it is rarely updated as well (people forget to check it, answers needed quickly get answered slowly and usually too late) and tends to have some topics die out before they get a definitive answer. Also, without a tag system, searching is… difficult. The personal websites are again very slowly updated, no one knows about where they are exactly and how to search through them and odds are they have different navigations, templates, and are a mess to deal with, especially if there are more sites about the same thing. It becomes a nightmare…

The solution? A centralized wiki. It’s simple to use, simple to edit, simple to secure from outside access (logins), data is fresher (since more people add to the same pages), tagging features aid in searching and the centralized domain means that duplicate content is less of an issue. Also, more experts from the same field can verify and correct false information, making it a self-correcting system. And, as wikipedia has shown us, it works…

Now let’s see if Google has done this. Well, not quite… First, everyone has his or her page and not a centralized wiki, BUT you do have a way to see all the sites within the domain. Now let’s see what a page contains and how you make it. There’s a title, then very useful categories and description fields which unfortunately are optional, the option to share the site with all people in the company, some of them only, or the whole world (make it a public website), then you choose a template and voila… Home. And from here on, it’s completely wiki style, which is the best thing possible.

This is a useful thing for any business, and the fact that you can make them public is useful for SEO purposes… Off the top of my head I can see how you can make todo lists and procedures for your company with them, as for SEO, well, there’s a lot of social media stuff that is just waiting to be done…

So, all in all, I consider this to be a very welcome replacement for Squidoo, and I find it very very useful for firms, be they big or small.

To close this off, I give you this introductory video from Google to help you get what Google Sites is:

As for the link, just click the image below, and for an example, here’s a site I’ve made in 2 minutes (it’s obvious)…

And since this has been such a great, this is the point where you should really subscribe… I mean come on, aren’t you even a bit curious about what’s going to be here tomorrow?

Well, as a reply to an email I’ve received I’m writing this post to clarify a few things. So I see many of you have found riding the Google wave quite interesting and have decided to open a blog or some other way of monetizing this new advantage.

First question I was asked whether to stick with blogger or use Wordpress on a fresh domain. It’s a good question and both have their advantages. On the one hand blogger is trusted by Google, even with no activity on it, it still ranks higher than most (I have a Blogger blog I haven’t posted to in years and Google still ranks it as number one for eydryan… Even higher than my blog for my regional Google (google.ro). So blogger brings with it a very welcomed trusted badge which helps you get good with Google.

On the other hand though, one could use Wordpress.com, which is like Google but in my opinion offers more visibility (through many tags and categories) but since it’s a spammers best choice may be a little more sandboxed than blogger. You also get the wordpress.com domain trust badge (these are metaphorical, don’t start asking me how to get one) and that counts to your results. Now wordpress has the big advantage of giving you (albeit limited) statistics about your blog and keywords used to find it etc.

The best choice however is undoubtedly getting your own domain and installing Wordpress on it. It’s (almost) easy, and you get a LOT more options than on wordpress.com. Also, you can use a little hack to get all three blogs to provide traffic.

So you have your domain, first thing to do is install Wordpress and then onto the plugins. You absolutely need the following plugins if you want to get high rankings. First is All in One SEO plugin google it, it basically does a lot of the seo work itself and ensures proper linking techniques. Don’t forget to configure it (as with most plugins, its settings are at the options tab of your dashboard). Then, a nice addition is Configurable Tag Cloud which creates tags, which are used with the All in one SEO (make it include tags) and the XML sitemap generator. It installs like a widget in the sidebar. Moving on we have Google XML Sitemaps which generates sitemaps and pings the search engines that they’re there. Also, it ads the sitemap in your robots text. Make sure to have it index tags so you will get a lot more keyword traffic. A couple of favorites of mine are wordpress.com stats which is basically what it sais, and Ultimate Google Analytics which lessens the process of integrating the analytics code into your pages, thereby offering you more data to work with in Google Analytics. You can find all these plugins at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ or if not, Google is your friend. It’s not my purpose here to explain how the plugins work, if you want me to clarify that send me an email or a comment and I’ll do a separate post on that.

Ok so you have the plugins, I presume you’ve taken care of the theme… Now, before you do anything, write a few posts as drafts. If possible make it last you a week or so. That ensures that when the flood comes you have content to post.

Also, if you want the Google Boost Effect you need to make sure you update the blog consistently . The point here is to make Google think you’re as much of a news site as possible, feeding it fresh content optimally every day.

Now once you have the blog set up and some posts in the cache you can start it up. Make sure all works, make sure there are no broken links, make sure all looks legit both from a human point of view as well as a Spider point of view (see Lynx browser) and then launch it on the web. Give it two or three posts at first, make sure people visiting will read them, and start the social media game. Digg it, stumble it, sphinn it, do everything to it that you know of SMO.

Wash, rinse and repeat, ad infinitum. Well, not really. For example stumbleupon cuts off traffic after about one and a half week of continuous posting from the same domain. SMO is a whole new chapter but it’s safe to say that if you write smart content and submit it you get traffic.

The trick I was talking about earlier is about taking advantage of both Wordpress.com and Blogger.com by creating similar blogs there and posting two or three posts (which are similar, and may be even identical if they’re only two or three) and then linking back to your main blog thereby giving you high PR links back. Easy.

Also, don’t forget to check out http://eydryan.com/2008/02/19/seo-for-wordpress-blogs-tips-and-tricks/ which is an older post about well wordpress and seo and it gives a lot more pointers on the whole thing …

A little addendum is for a question I didn’t answer before. Should you tie your domain with your wordpress.com or blogger blog? The short answer is no. The long answer is no because all that happens then is the all your visitors to the main domain are simply redirected to the blogger domain and to Google it looks as if your paid domain doesn’t even exist. So if you want to use the search terms you use in your domain name and make them worth somthing take the extra time to set up a wordpress account on your domain. Oh, and after you set up the blog, don’t forget to set the permissions to 400 on the config file to prevent anyone from stealing your passwords…

I do say, another great post isn’t it? Worth subscribing I say… See you next time

I’ve read about it at the beginning of this year, but failed to see how it could impact SEO. I’ve heard nothing since but it’s been clearer and clearer why this is a very important change. You see, a great factor in ranking is the age of a domain/website. That means that normally the older you are, the better you’ve become and the more of an authority you’ve become. Sure, this is coupled with traffic, since without that you’d just be an old website, but still, it’s important.

photo credit: jared

However, starting this year Google has made a slight change which means that results also have a spice of recency to it. Let me explain. You see, on the web it’s only normal for news to be up high, everywhere you look. Blogs rank posts by recency, and so does flickr, youtube and basically everyone in the biz. However Google did not take this into consideration, well except for newest content in the sense of updated information. Now, on the other hand, Google treats them as news.

Still don’t get it? It’s easy as a concept. Rather than adding a bonus (or penalty) if you have updated content on your website, Google gives you a radical boost for a certain keyword, but for a limited time. When I first launched this website, it wasn’t really a launch but rather a measly splash screen (optimised though). When Google first got wind of it, and sniffing the stumbleupon traffic (i had a nice sketch of how the website would look in my head) it gave me such a boost that only one day after indexing i was ranked second for the very specific term of “eydryan”. Now this is a feat since I have an online presence and there are around 1500 results for that keyword to be outranked by an emptyish page. However, after Google saw that there was nothing interesting there I got quickly demoted to place 16-18.

Now for the fun part though. How do we take advantage of this? Simple, make Google know you’re a newsroom. Make him understand you always have new, fresh content, keyword rich and properly linked. Thereby, you will keep on riding the Google wave. Even now if you search for “eydryan” you’ll see it’s not my homepage, but rather one of my recent posts (and depending on data center and tld you’ll find it at positions 1 to 4, and sometimes with two entries). That means Google is giving me, a PR zero site the upperhand on even Cnet, which is a big player. Not to talk about propeller, etc. That is because Google gets updated content on eydryan from me almost every day. What more proof that I am a reference for eydryan.

Now this has been a sandbox experiment, and it has also proven that you can easily and quickly escape the Google sandbox by posting a lot of unique new content. Now it’s time to take it to the next level. A recent project, as i have mentioned in my last post, is to create a blog for a company i’m doing seo for. That means I’m battling big players and that I need to create something Google doesn’t find on those pages. Which is why I turn to SMO. The best supporting tool for this new algorithm is SMO.

So, let’s repeat how we can take advantage of the new change. We must create new, unique content, do it in a consistent and timely manner, and back it up with traffic from Social Media Networks and you have yourself an SEO booster. Of course, to properly handle this you need to combine it with conventional marketing techniques in order to make sure that crowd flowing in will in fact convert…

My time is limited these days so that’s why the short posts, however it will be concise but very interesting for the next few days, and maybe by the end of the week I’ll post the Complete SEO factors guide, but for that, you need to subscribe to my feed… PS: you can do it by email too, just click on the feed and select feedburner email subscription.

As one of my linking campaign attempts I’m looking for stuff to do. Now i know this is in no way new as a practice, but it’s always a good idea to make a company blog. Whether it will be a fully fledged corporate blog or a simple tourist blog like i’m making, it’s going to be a way of extending your brand and that’s always a good thing. A brand is the most important thing on the web so you should take all efforts to promote it.

While I won’t go into any detail tonight since it’s 2 am and I have to sleep (been up all night on the company blog and studying EU law).  This is a small short tip and I promise you a full post tomorrow my loyal feed readers. And don’t forget, I announced that full SEO factors guide and it’s coming soon, so grab the feed and stay tuned.