New Data From Google Can Help You Optimize Your Site. Google has just started sharing more detailed data for each individual search query in the Top search queries feature in Webmaster Tools. Google used to just report the average position at which your site’s pages appeared in the search results for a particular query. Now users can click on a given search query to see a breakdown of the number of impressions (number of times your site’s pages appeared in the results for the query), as well as the amount of clickthrough (number of times searchers clicked on that query’s search results to visit a page from your site) for each position your site’s pages appeared at in the results associated with that query. Google also shows a list of your site’s pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query.
How Accurate is the Data?
Google’s addition of the new data has been met with a great deal of enthusiasm. Comments on Google’s announcement are overwhelmingly positive. That’s not to say, however, that there isn’t some amount of skepticism.
“As I said, this data will be very useful if it is indeed accurate. There’s been some Twitter buzz from other SEOs whose data doesn’t match up with their Google Analytics,” says Whalen. “For our High Rankings website, the clickthroughs for any given keyword phrase didn’t exactly match what my Google Analytics showed for the same keyword phrases, but it was fairly close. For instance, my top two Google organic keyword phrases showed 3,020 and 1,193 visits when using Google Analytics. Via Webmaster Tools, the same keyword phrases show 2900 and 1300, respectively. That’s pretty close. Perhaps they’re sort of just rounding off (in a strange kind of way!). Other phrases had similar differences in the numbers.”
Google’s Blogger Users Can Now Customize Their Design Templates.
Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.
Features of the template designer include:
– 15 new templates (with more on the way)
– Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
– Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto
– Customizable colors, fonts, and more.
“Over the past few years we’ve worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day,” Google says. “But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer.”
“While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog’s design & layout – putting the user in complete control,” the company says. It’s interesting that this kind of customization has not been available from Blogger until 2010, as Blogger itself is over a decade old, and has been Google-owned since 2003″
Google Launches Social Search Experiment.
The Social Search Experiment feature that Marissa Mayer announced last week is becoming available today for everyone to try. Google Social Search promises to help users “find more relevant public content from your broader social circle.”
The premise is simple: people value their acquaintances’ content more than that of random strangers. So Google Social Search brings content from your social circle to the forefront, perhaps showing a friend’s or coworker’s take on a restaurant rather than (or in addition to) whatever the local newspaper reviewer had to say.
On the Official Google Blog, Maureen Heymans and Murali Viswanathan explained, “The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. . . . If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups. And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.
Appearing in social search results means:
1. Make sure you have all of your important links on your Google Profile.
2. Make as many connections as possible.
3. Encourage customers to follow you via social networks.
4. Participate in social media so people will engage with you.
5. Encourage sharing of content (there are plenty available social media buttons)
6. Include social network info on business cards/signage, etc.
7. Include social network info in your online advertising
8. There are probably many more worthwhile tips (if you have any, share them in the comments).
Recently, Google announced the launch of font size controls over your Google Adsense code, small, medium and large size.
What is the advantage here? Is it will inscrease your earning or CTR? Peter A. Prestipino from websitemagazine.com said “I personally don’t have any doubts that it increases CTR (click-through rate) and ultimately earnings,…” but i myself realized big difference in CRT and earning during recent week. The ads look better impressive and it’s attractive the readers, surely, at least on my blogs.
Google Adsense is the third program that pay me for 3 years already and till paying me well.
Will you get the change and see more dollars rush onto your pocket?
Tell me the truth after a week, ok?
Does the size in kb of a page give any benefit to search engine ranking? The reason I ask is that I am in the process of re-designing my site using CSS and this has much smaller page sizes than I had before, obviously I am keeping my content but whereas a page in my site would have been perhaps 100k before – it is now 30k with the same content – I was worried that google would see this as a dramatic change but having poped up this week on page 2 of google for a term that I only built the page for two weeks ago I am quite pleased with the initial results…
The term in question was “acard duplicators”
If any of you guys on here can give me any more tips on CSS or analyse that page to see if I have made any obvious mistakes then I would be very greatful..
I recently took over a Private Investigator website. The owner has several identical websites, same template, same text, same keyword stuffing, same white text on white background. The previous webmaster even went to a government page about Private Investigators, cut and pasted the entire page links and all, to the bottom of the home page in white. Private investigator – retired NYPD detectives New York NY NJ CT
I’ve completely rewritten the website, started a link exchange, submitted to directories and engines. It has only been one month but I haven’t cracked into Google’s top 60 for my keywords and I’m starting to get ranked in Yahoo. Still a little more tweeking going on
Beside the AdSense Help Forum now Google Adsense publishers can press their opinion on Google adsense blogs. They “hope that this feature will offer you engaging conversations and exchanges on a variety of topics”.
link: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/05/now-open-for-comments.html
